Unlike most countries, Korea did not implement a lockdown in its battle against COVID-19, instead successfully relying on testing and contact tracing. Only one region, Daegu-Gyeongbuk, had a significant number of infections, traced to a religious sect. This allows us to estimate the causal...

We compare different indicators of the spread and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, developing a novel method to adjust daily COVID-19 deaths to match weekly excess mortality. Focusing on Sweden, the only country that has good data and did not impose a lockdown, we construct counterfactuals...