Socio-Economic Impacts of Pandemic Influenza Mitigation Scenarios in Slovakia

The aim of this paper is to assess the expected socio-economic impacts of various scenarios of pandemic influenza mitigation on the economy and mortality for Slovakia. The paper relies on data accessible in the literature as well as on data supplied by pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. Similar studies have been worked out in the past e.g. for the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports (see Van Genugten et al. (2003)). There is however a significant difference. Whereas those studies work from the very beginning with the expected values of the data, we have treated the data and also the model parameters as random variables. Results in the form of probability distributions and their characteristics (expected values and tolerance intervals) were obtained by stochastic Monte Carlo simulations of random impacts on 5,400,000 inhabitants of Slovakia. Six scenarios of pandemia mitigation have been analyzed. We have compared the total costs of the medical treatment, the number of casualties as well as social costs with casualties included. An interesting conclusion is that pandemic vaccination and pre-vaccination make the course of the pandemia more predictable