How Efficient are Government Stringency Responses in Curbing the Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic?
- September 12, 2020
- Posted by: RSIS
- Categories: IJRISS, Social Science
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue VIII, August 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186
How Efficient are Government Stringency Responses in Curbing the Spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Elvis Dze Achuo
Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences, the University of Dschang – Cameroon
Abstract: This study quantitatively examines the effectiveness of government response policies in abating the spread of COVID-19. We employed daily data spanning from mid-February 2020 to early August 2020 for a panel of 50 African countries. Results of the IRFs of the panel VAR model shows a negative significant long-run effect of government stringent responses on the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. This implies that stricter government responses reduce the spread of COVID-19. The robustness of this result was verified with the help of the FMOLS and DOLS estimators. Consequently, this study recommends that African governments should step-up their community screening/testing capacities and continuously organise health campaigns to sensitize the citizens on the importance of respecting COVID-19 barrier measures. Equally, African governments should rethink the health of their citizens by increasing investments in the health sector in order to prevent the devastating health impacts of unexpected future pandemics.
Key Words: COVID-19, Panel VAR Model, Government Response Stringency Index, Pandemic Disease.
I. INTRODUCTION
The coronavirus disease 2019 dubbed COVID-19 that broke out in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan is believed to be caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Lescure et al., 2020). However, in less than nine months since the outbreak of COVID-19 was cranked up in China, the virus has continued spreading across the globe at a geometric rate, and as of August 12th 2020, over 213 countries and territories across the world and 2 international conveyances have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (Worldometer, 2020). Although China initially served as the epicentre of the virus, economic globalisation, especially through trade and tourism triggered the spread of the virus as travellers from China served as vectors of the disease to other countries across the world (McKibbin and Fernando, 2020a).
