Epidemics and increasing returns to scale on social distancing
Link to article:
Authors:
Nævdal, Eric
Year:
2020
Reference:
39, 139-148Summary
It is shown that the standard Susceptible Infectious Recovered model of an epidemic implies that there for a large set of epidemic parameter values there will be increasing returns to scale if the objective is to limit the economic cost of infection. The explanation is that if an epidemic has a high basic reproduction number, a given amount of social distancing will not have much effect. The same amount may however be very effective if the reproduction number is lower, (but still larger than one.)
