When South Africa implemented its non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) (its "lockdown") to stem the COVID-19 … pandemic in March 2020, it was hailed as exemplary. By June 2020 however, the lockdown was in disarray: the number of confirmed … than 50,000 businesses, to have government end the lockdown altogether. In this paper we argue that both government and the …

US states have implemented lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess the impact of state policy … associated with social distancing. We find that lockdown measures are effective in alleviating disease severity, but yield …

health and economic factors in a pandemic and how appropriate “lockdown”, income transfer, and loan policies could be …

We study the problem of a policymaker who aims at taming the spread of an epidemic while minimizing its associated … numerical experiments illustrating the structure of the optimal lockdown policy. In all our experiments the latter is … characterized by three distinct periods: the epidemic is first let freely evolve, then vigorously tamed, and finally a less …