This work estimates the impact of the preventive isolation measures adopted by national and regional authorities in Colombia to answer the following question: Where do the government's isolation measures effectively reduce the number of COVID 19 infections and deaths? Using official information reported by the Ministry of Health and constructing a panel data structure, a model of differences in differences suggested by Cerulli and Ventura is estimated. Estimates of the impact of containment measures show that the peak is delayed and the number of infections and deaths reduced. The government's response to the pandemic on diseases has a significant dynamic impact over time once implemented. The pre-treatment period was significantly affected by the current treatment.
TopIntroduction
The world is currently facing a wave of uncertainty and adverse effects in all orders of the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China, on December 10, 2019, where the first death occurred a month later, on January 9, 2020. From that moment on, it reflected the speed of the disease's spread in the number of reported cases, which grew exponentially worldwide.
Colombia was no exception. The first case of contagion in this country, classified as imported, occurred in Bogotá on March 6, involving a 22-year-old woman from Milan, Italy. Since then, COVID-19 has been spreading throughout the country. As of July 30 this year, the Ministry of Health's official data indicates that the number of confirmed cases in Colombia is 276,055, 9,454 deaths, and 142,777 recovered, leaving a balance of 123,258 active cases in the country. At the city level, according to information from the National Health Institute (INS), Bogotá D.C. leads the way with 95,199 points, followed by Barranquilla (28,940), Cali (17,797), Cartagena (15,209), Leticia (2,372), and Villavicencio (2,160)1.
The response of the National Government to stop the spread of the virus was not long in coming. On Tuesday, March 24, a nationwide quarantine was decreed, which would end on May 25. However, given the increase in the number of cases and deaths, the measure was extended until July 31, 2020. The idea of quarantine or preventive isolation measures is to buy time and avoid the collapse of health systems and try to delay the peak of disease transmission.
This chapter estimates and analyzes the impact of the government's containment measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic's harmful effects in Colombia. The interest in estimating these measures' impact lies in responding to the following counterfactual: what would have happened to the number of infections and deaths from the pandemic if the government had not implemented preventive isolation measures? It is well known that such strategies seek to postpone the peak of disease and flatten the infection curve in the country while preventing the health system from collapsing. A difference-in-differences model using a city-level data panel estimates the dynamic effect of confinement on the outcome variables number of infections and deaths.
The results show that infections' treatment effect has a significant dynamic influence over time once it is implemented. The period before the treatment was significantly affected by the current treatment, showing that quarantine generated a fall in the daily rate of infections of approximately 5%. The quarantine effects in the periods following its implementation (t + 1) were equally important. This result implied an accumulated drop in the number of infections after the impact of 12.3%. The post-treatment period significantly impacted the rate of infections once the government issued the containment measure.
The motivation for this analysis is manifested in the following aspects, which relate to the government's ability to mitigate the catastrophic effects of the pandemic:
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Uncertainty: The world is facing a wave of anticipation and adverse effects at all levels due to the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic, which translates into policy dilemmas that the government faces flattening the infection curve and at the same time avoid a collapse of the economy. This is known as the hammer and dance strategy (Baldwin and Weder di Mauro, 2020, Fernandez Villaverde et al, 2020, Eichenbaum, Rebelo y Trabandt, 2020, Farboodi, Jarosch y Shimer, 2020).
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Policy interventions: Government response capacity to mitigate the adverse effects of the pandemic while trying to minimize the negative impact on the economy, which have manifested themselves in significant job losses and sharp drops in the Gross Domestic Product, accentuation of poverty, and inequality, among others.
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Health and the economy: The current situation poses a dilemma between health and the economy. The quarantines and other containment measures are a moral imperative in the face of the pandemic because people are dying who shouldn't be dying in countries where the costs of containment and financial bailouts to protect the economy can be borne.
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Supply and demand shocks: For Colombia, Zuleta (2020) and Cárdenas (2020) have diagnosed how the pandemic affected the Colombian economy. They find that the shocks translate into the paralysis of several sectors of the economy and job insecurity, exit of many companies from the market and job destruction, drop in central government revenues as a result of the recession and deterioration in fuel prices, high future fiscal costs for government programs to mitigate the harmful effects of the pandemic.