Notes for a COVID_19 pandemic management research project: (I) Presentation.
I start with this post what I intend to be a series of texts, of irregular periodicity, as personal notes that can serve as a starting point for a upcoming project dedicated to evaluate the public management of the pandemic of Covid_19, and its results.
In no case will these texts be presented as closed or definitive analyses, and they will always be open to modification, improvement, and commentary by those who read them and want to contribute their opinion.
They will only be a starting point for the study of how each country or region of the planet has managed the coronavirus crisis in its first phase.
The option of evaluating the public policies applied in what has been called the first wave (which here will be considered to range from January 2020 to early June 2020) is explained for a number of reasons.
The first of these is that for that period there is more and better data on incidence and mortality for most countries, which facilitates descriptive and analytical work.
Another compelling reason for selecting that phase is the plausible hypothesis that the actions and public decisions taken at that time have served to establish or condition the degree of adherence to the measures proposed in that phase and in subsequent phases. In other words, the success of the public interventions carried out in that phase has helped to determine the degree of public confidence in the management of their governments, which in turn has been able to be projected into the next two waves.
Finally, the analysis of the public management of that first wave can serve to show the degree of strength of each country’s public health services at the beginning of the pandemic.
For my profession, that of teaching economics, the approach will be fundamentally from the economic analysis, and more specifically from the perspective of public economics and public management. For this reason, the aspects of other areas of knowledge, such as epidemiology, or any of the clinical disciplines, even though their contributions must be essential in the explanations of what happened, will remain in the second or third level of analysis, and will be approached with the greatest possible rigor by someone who contemplates them with the astonished eyes of an inexpert.
The different approaches with which this health crisis has been managed in countries that are also different from one another provide an enormous wealth of measures, approaches and perspectives that should be used to analyze and compare what has been done in each country, or in each region of the planet, and above all to compare their results in terms of health, lives, and also the functioning of their economies.
- Why have countries that did very well in the first wave not been able to replicate those results in the second?
- Why were developed countries with well-designed public health systems unable to control it?
- Why were countries that were burdened by budgetary austerity policies able to handle the first wave better than other countries with more abundant resources?
- Is there an Asian pattern of pandemic management that we in the West are not able to understand or implement?
- Are there systems that because of their organization, centralized or decentralized, or because of their insurance scheme, have been more effective in managing pandemics?
The analyses will always be based on data and considerations of a positive nature. Not only because I believe that this is the only intellectually honest way to study the behavior of governments in this case, but because this situation has generated an abundant volume of quantitative information, which is being shared on the web as possibly never before. For each data set, the source will be indicated, and how to access it.
The text will be supported by data visualization elements that will allow for the extraction of all the information contained therein, as well as the behavior and action patterns of public management.
