COVID-19

On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Prof. James Robinson of the University of Chicago about subjects including the global response to the coronavirus, why he believes China’s statistics can’t be trusted, whether anything can be learned from China’s response to the pandemic, and the impact of poor public health policies on the ability to respond to the coronavirus outbreak. 

The World Health Organization’s decision Thursday to declare the novel coronavirus an international public health emergency could stoke investors’ fears about the disease and the economic risks it poses. “It might be better to have a short-term quarantine and have high short-term economic costs than to have a longer term where people are concerned about diseases floating around,” said Anup Malani, an economist and professor at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine.

Abstract: SARS-CoV-2 has had a greater burden, as measured by rate of infection, in poorer communities within cities. For example, 55% of Mumbai slums residents had antibodies to COVID-19, 3.2 times the seroprevalence in non-slum areas of the city according to a sero-survey done in July 2020. One explanation is that government suppression was less severe in poorer communities, either because the poor were more likely to be exempt or unable to comply. Another explanation is that effective suppression itself accelerated the epidemic in poor neighborhoods because households are more crowded and residents share toilet and water facilities. We show there is little evidence for the first hypothesis in the context of Mumbai. Using location data from smart phones, we find that slum residents had nominally but not significantly (economically or statistically) higher mobility than non-slums prior to the sero-survey. We also find little evidence that mobility in non-slums was lower than in slums during lockdown, a subset of the period before the survey.

Journal of Urban Economics