Lockdown: Can we learn from the 1918 influenza pandemic? Correia, Luck and Verner suggest NPIs can indeed improve health and economic outcomes based on the experience of the influenza pandemic in the United States in 1918/19. First, we find that areas that were more severely affected by the 1918 Flu Pandemic see a sharp and persistent decline in real economic activity. First, the influenza pandemic coincided with the end of the war and the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy, a point the authors acknowledge, but only briefly and without much further analysis. Third, the lack of high-frequency monthly data makes it much more difficult to assess the short-term economic impact of the NPIs in 1918.

Source: Standard Digital April 08, 2020 21:00 UTC