Orihuel Enrique, Sapena Juan, Bertó Ramón, Navarro Josep
Betelgeux-Christeyns, Betelgeux-Christeyns Chair for a Sustainable Economy, Spain.
Catholic University of Valencia, Economics Department and Betelgeux-Christeyns Chair for a Sustainable Economy, Spain.
Technol Forecast Soc Change. 2023 Jul;192:122572. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122572. Epub 2023 Apr 10.
Quantifying the spreading power of a pandemic like COVID-19 is important for the early implementation of early restrictions on social mobility and other interventions to slow its spread. This work aims to quantify the power of spread, defining a new indicator, the pandemic momentum index. It is based on the analogy between the kinematics of disease spread and the kinematics of a solid in Newtonian mechanics. This index, , is useful for assessing the risk of spread. Based on the evolution of the pandemic in Spain, a decision-making scheme is proposed that allows early responses to the spread and decreases the incidence of the disease. This index has been calculated retrospectively for the pandemic in Spain, and a counterfactual analysis shows that if the decision-making scheme had been used as a guide, the most significant decisions on restrictions would have been advanced: the total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 would have been much lower during the period studied, with a significant reduction in the total number of cases: 83 % (sd = 2.6). The results of this paper are consistent with the numerous studies on the pandemic that concluded that the early implementation of restrictions is more important than their severity. Early response slows the spread of the pandemic by applying less severe mobility restrictions, reducing the number of cases and deaths, and doing less damage to the economy.
量化像新冠疫情这样的大流行病的传播能力，对于尽早实施社会流动限制及其他减缓其传播的干预措施而言至关重要。这项工作旨在量化传播能力，定义一个新指标——大流行势头指数。它基于疾病传播运动学与牛顿力学中固体运动学之间的类比。这个指数， ，对于评估传播风险很有用。基于西班牙疫情的演变，提出了一种决策方案，该方案能对传播做出早期应对并降低疾病发病率。这个指数已针对西班牙的疫情进行了回顾性计算，一项反事实分析表明，如果将该决策方案用作指导，关于限制措施的最重要决策将会提前做出：在所研究的时间段内，新冠确诊病例总数会低得多，病例总数会显著减少：83%（标准差 = 2.6）。本文的结果与众多关于该疫情的研究一致，这些研究得出结论，尽早实施限制措施比措施的严格程度更重要。早期应对通过实施不太严格的流动限制来减缓疫情传播，减少病例和死亡数量，并对经济造成较小损害。
