Should contact bans be lifted in Germany? A quantitative prediction of its effects

Jean Roch Donsimoni; René Glawion; Bodo Plachter; Constantin Weiser; Klaus Wälde

There is an exploding literature on COVID19 and its e¤ects. A …rst survey is in , a broader overview is in Gros et al. (2020) . We build our analysis on the model and projection presented in Donsimoni et al. (2020a) . 2 In contrast to this paper, we (i) provide a more precise calibration of the e¤ect of no public health measures. The precision results from the availability of more observations. This is essential for quantifying the e¤ects of lifting RSC. We (ii) can also quantify the e¤ects of RSC in the present paper as su¢ cient data has become available since our earlier work. Our most recent observation now is from 7 April. Most importantly, due to the availability of enough observations, we can (iii) employ purely statistical methods to make a forecast for the current RSC. This allows us to work without assumptions about long-run infection and sickness rates. For judging the e¤ect of a lift of RSC, we do need to return to long-run assumptions, however, as we need to work with the theoretical model developed in Donsimoni et al. (2020a) again. Adamik et al. (2020) also quantitatively analyse the situation in Germany. They employ a microsimulation model which allows to better understand the e¤ect of heterogeneity across households. They argue that reaching herd immunity without violating the capacity limit of the health care system is likely to fail. They do not explicitly analyse the e¤ects of RSC and do not discuss the …t of their model to observed data. Dehning et al. (2020) estimate parameters of their model in a statistically very convincing way. They focus on constant transition rates for di¤erent RSC-regimes (but do allow for time-dependency to smooth between regimes). They make forecasts for a period of two to three weeks and use data up to 31 March. 3 The analysis by Gros et al. (2020) also takes the economic costs of RSC into account. They do not provide forecasts. Promising future work could combine their economic cost approach with forecasts.