Andrew G. Atkeson’s research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places

... The impact of testing has also been studied. Droste et al. (2024) show that widespread screening tests have huge economic benefits, especially if supported by confirmatory tests. Eichenbaum et al. (2022) compare societies with different levels of aversion to social distancing in a world where testing capacities arise gradually. ...

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Optimal testing and social distancing of individuals with private health signals

... 17 These excluded studies focused on high profile places such as Italy, Sweden, and New York, that -possibly because they were hit early and were surprised by the pandemic -experienced very high 13 A common problem with epidemiological models is that they don't take spontaneous behavior changes into account and therefore produce erroneous forecasts (Coccia 2023). And even when they do, these behavior changes and consequently the results are based on the authors' assumptions rather than empirical evidence (Atkeson 2023;Toxvaerd 2020). 14 With R 0 = 2.0 and trigger on 60, the number of COVID-19-deaths in Great Britain could be reduced to 5,600 deaths from 410,000 deaths (-99%) with a policy consisting of case isolation + home quarantine + social distancing + school/university closure (Ferguson et al., 2020, p. 13). ...

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Were COVID-19 lockdowns worth it? A meta-analysis

... In a separate study by Born et al. (2021), the authors used a synthetic control method to suggest that Sweden's decision not to implement widespread lockdown measures did not significantly contribute to its COVID-19 death cases. Other studies, such as Atkeson et al. (2020), Medica (2020), andDe Larochelambert et al. (2020), also found no significant differences in mortality rates among different pandemic responses and population density. These findings challenge the widely held belief that pandemic responses are effective at controlling the spread of the virus. ...

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An investigation of the effects of lockdowns and COVID-19 vaccinations in Ireland

... The slowdown of economic (and other) activity even before initial COVID wave restrictions were put in place provided clear evidence that endogenous distancing was important. McAdams (2021) provides an insightful review of the burgeoning literature which includes the theoretical analyses of McAdams (2020) and Toxvaerd (2020) showing that dynamics can be very different under distancing, policy-oriented papers like Eichenbaum et al. (2021) and Farboodi et al. (2021) noting that this can make optimal mitigation policies very different from what they would be in a pure SIR model, and empirical analyses including (Atkeson et al. 2021) and (Droste and Stock 2021) estimating behavioral parameters and noting that they appear to differ across time and place. ...

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Implications of heterogeneous SIR models for analyses of COVID-19

... Many of these are also the main candidate policies for stopping the spread of other large-scale epidemic outbreaks, such as Ebola. One particularly low-cost intervention that has been tried in a few locations is mass testing of a population in order to identify asymptomatic carriers 3,4 . Theoretical work suggests that mass testing could reduce daily infections by up to 30 percent 5 , while a study on the impact of a mass testing campaign undertaken in Slovakia in late 2020 finds that it temporarily decreased the growth of COVID-19 by 70 percent 6 . ...

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Assessing the impact of COVID-19 mass testing in South Tyrol using a semi-parametric growth model

... 13 See Atkeson, Kopecky, and Zha (2021) for an extension of the canonical SIR model that incorporates spontaneous feedback from disease prevalence to disease transmission. 14 Alternative approaches to estimating the effects of mandated social distancing measures are offered by Chernozhukov, Kasahara, and Schrimpf (2021) and Huang (2020). ...

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Social distancing and supply disruptions in a pandemic

... These three epidemiological conditions currently used have proven to be relatively reliable in defining the end of the epidemic. The early or premature declaration of the end of an outbreak would put the population at risk of a resurgence of infections, while too late or delayed end-of-outbreak declaration would greatly increase the economic and social cost owing to repeated extensive molecular testing and the stagnation of social activity (Du et al., 2021;Atkeson et al., 2020;The British Academy, 2021;Elliott, 2020). Quantifying the end-of-outbreak confidence in the late stage of the epidemic on the basis of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2022.111149 ...

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A quantitative method to project the probability of the end of an epidemic: Application to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, 2020

... Although first studies are, of course, already available. The data-driven studies includeAtkeson et al. (2020),Bendavid et al. (2021),Bjørnskov (2021) andChaudhry et al. (2020) who all find no evidence of lockdown effectiveness. ...

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This time is different?—on the use of emergency measures during the corona pandemic

... Mathematical and computational models are key tools for understanding pandemic spread and designing intervention policies that help control a pandemic's spread (Atkeson 2020;Andraud et al. 2012). In particular, coupled ordinary and partial differential equations, as well as simpler growthcurve equations, are previously used to capture pandemic spread in general Kampmeijer and Zadoks 1997;Lazebnik 2023;Zhang et al. 2023;Asadi-Zeydabadi et al. 2021) and STD diseases spread, in particular (Liljeros et al. 2003;Galvin and Cohen 2004). ...

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Mathematical model of dating apps’ influence on sexually transmitted diseases spread

... The equivalent value of γ is 1 − (17/18) 14 . Since α is the proportion of infectious agents dying, the daily and the equivalent values are the same without mask protection, we adopt the two-week equivalent values from existing literature (Acemoglu et al. 2021;Atkeson 2020;Verity et al. 2020). For the mask protection rates, we follow a moderate setting as suggested by Eikenberry et al. (2020). ...

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Efficient mask allocation during a pandemic