Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions for Pandemics: Benefits and Harms, Looking Backward and Looking Forward

This talk will describe two projects, one in the middle and one just getting under way, both related to the benefits and harms of COVID-19 control measures.

The first project aims overall to provide a rigorous estimate of the benefits of COVID-19 control measures prior to vaccination in terms of COVID-19 deaths averted. Prominent existing analyses (T. Bollyky et al., 2023, Lancet, and empirical estimates in Macedo and Lee In COVID’s Wake 2025, suggest that this benefit was nonexistent - that adoption of anti-COVID restrictions had no measurable impact on COVID-19 deaths - but suffer from major methodological limitations and defects. This part of the talk will lay out the conditions for an appropriate analysis of this question and will describe planned work to conduct such an analysis.

The second project, with CISAC fellow Johannes Ponge, aims to assess the degree to which existing pandemic response plans incorporate consideration of unintended consequences of these measures in sectors such as the economy, education, and mental health, and to create tools to aid decision makers in tracking such impacts in future pandemics.

Perry Conference Room