Assessment of monthly economic losses in Wuhan under the lockdown against COVID-19

Abstract

With the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, aggressive countermeasures have been taken, including the implementation of the unprecedented lockdown of the city, which will necessarily cause huge economic losses for the city of Wuhan. In this paper, we attempt to uncover the interactions between epidemic prevention and control measures and economic-social development by estimating the health loss and meso-economic loss from a human-oriented perspective. We implemented a compartmental model for the transmission dynamics and health burden assessment to evaluate the health losses, then estimated the direct and indirect economic losses of industries using the Input-Output model. Based on these estimates, the first monthly health losses and meso-economic losses caused by the lockdown was assessed. The overall policy effect of the lockdown policy in Wuhan was also investigated. The health loss and meso-economic losses are used to evaluate the health burden and loss of residents’ mental health, the direct economic loss of several worst-hit industries, and the indirect economic loss of all industries, respectively. Our findings reveal that the health burden caused by this pandemic is estimated to be 4.4899 billion yuan (CNY), and the loss of residents’ mental health is evaluated to be 114.545 billion yuan, the direct economic losses in transport, logistics, and warehousing, postal service, food, and beverage service industries reach 21.6094 billion yuan, and the monthly indirect economic losses of all industries are 36.39661994 billion yuan caused by the lockdown. The total monthly economic losses during the lockdown reach 177.0413 billion yuan. However, the lockdown policy has been considered to reduce COVID-19 infections by >180 thousand, which saves about 20 thousand lives, as well as nearly 30 billion yuan on medical costs. Therefore, the lockdown policy in Wuhan has obvious long-term benefits on the society and the total economic losses will be at a controllable level if effective measures are taken to combat COVID-19.

Investigation of COVID-19 Impact on the Food and Beverages Industry: China and India Perspective

“…Recently, several research studies have empirically demonstrated that economic shocks are propagating. A research by You et al [ 64 ] showed that the direct economic losses in the transportation, logistics, warehousing, postal, food, and beverage service industries of China amount to CNY 21.61 billion, and the monthly indirect economic losses are CNY 36.4 billion for all industries. During lockdown, the gross monthly economic losses hit CNY 177.04 billion.…”

MassMark: A Highly Scalable Multiplex NGS-based Method for High-Throughput, Accurate and Sensitive Detection of SARS-CoV-2 for Mass Testing

“…Mass testing has been mooted as the most practical and straightforward way 1,2 to curb the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, as it allows health authorities to rapidly identify and isolate infectious individuals, thus limiting the spread of disease and minimizing the need for drastic widespread lockdown measures, which can have negative socioeconomic consequences 15 . Even in places which have successfully controlled the initial wave of SARS-CoV-2 infections, population-scale mass testing has been proven to be helpful in identifying asymptomatic cases 30,31 that have been missed by symptom-based detection regimes but could still contribute to silent transmission of the virus 18,19 .…”

“…Mass testing has been proposed as a strategy to contain and break the cycle of SARS-CoV-2 transmission 1,2 while minimizing the need for drastic restrictive measures such as lockdowns, for which extended implementation is impractical due to severe, negative social and economic impacts 15 . Population-wide mass surveillance will also allow the detection of asymptomatic cases, estimated to be approximately 20% of total cases 16,17 , which form a contagious pool that contributes to viral transmission 18,19 but are difficult to identify with existing symptom-based detection protocols.…”

Modeling coupling dynamics between the transmission, intervention of COVID-19 and economic development

“…By using the models to simulate the transmission process, recent studies mainly focus on predicting propagation trends [11] , tracing transmission dynamics [12] , estimating infection risk [13] , and evaluating intervention effects [3] , [14] . Existing studies on the relation between COVID-19 and economics mainly stays in descriptive or analytical analysis [15] , [16] . Typical works include quantitatively analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in low- and middle-income countries [15] , and evaluating the monthly economic losses in Wuhan under the lockdown against COVID-19 by using compartment model and Input–Output model [16] .…”