More democratic countries are often expected to fail at providing a fast, strong, and effective response when facing a crisis such as COVID-19. This could result in higher infections and more negative health effects, but hard evidence to prove this claim is missing for the new disease. Studying...

This short paper analyzes the suggested positive impact of anti-Covid-19-policy protesters of two large protests in Germany on the county-specific 7-day incidence rate of Covid-19 of the discussion paper “Spreading the Disease” by Lange and Monscheuer (2021), LM henceforth. We firstly...

This study analyzes the impact of COVID-19 deniers on the spread of COVID-19 in Germany. In a first step, we establish a link between regional proxies of COVID-19 deniers and infection rates. We then estimate the causal impact of large anti-lockdown protests on the spread of COVID-19 using an...

Pandemics are a recurring feature of human history. The COVID-19 virus has several features that mean it poses a particularly severe challenge. It threatens to cause a collapse of hospital systems through a high number of serious cases arising in a short period of time, and this, rather than...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to be a constant threat in 2022 and is important to design appropriate vaccination campaigns to face next pandemic impacts driven by new variants. This study develops a Machine Learning experiment that shows, between countries, a rapid reduction...