Intermediate domestic travel bans can lead to increase in Covid-19 cases, reveals study
Mangalore Today News Network
New Delhi, April 29, 2021: A new study that uses data from India and five other countries shows that some of the domestic travel restrictions in large cities with vulnerable migrant populations could lead to increased Covid-19 cases.
The working paper put out by the researchers from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago suggests that although very short and long restrictions limit the spread of disease, moderately lengthy restrictions substantially increase infections.
The paper has used one of the widely used compartmental models in epidemiology that mimics a real-world scenario in many developing countries with empirical data from India, China, Indonesia, etc.
The study also proposed that the impact of domestic travel lockdowns in cities with significant rural-urban migration is nonlinear in nature.
“We find that while relatively short and relatively long restrictions can successfully limit the spread of Covid-19, intermediate-length bans—once lifted—can significantly increase Covid-19 growth rates, cumulative infections, and deaths”, authors of the paper- Fiona Burlig, Anant Sudarshan, and Garrison Schlauch said.
The study used a real-life incident of travel restrictions imposed in Mumbai last year and consecutive phase-wise movement of migrant labourers. It used an event study design to estimate the impact of the travel ban as well as the relaxations on Covid-19 cases in migrants’ home location and later used cross-country data to see if the estimated impacts were likely to hold true to a broader context.
The researchers further compared the impacts of travel bans in India, Indonesia, South Africa, the Philippines, China, and Kenya, which comprise roughly 40 per cent of the global population. The study argued that the full effect of travel bans can only be assessed after they are lifted.
“Our results underscore that quantifying the unintended consequences of Covid-19 restrictions, including both disease and economic costs, is critical for policy decisions”, the paper noted.
Dr Anant Sudarshan, Director (South Asia) of The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, pointed out that big cities like Mumbai were fast-growing coronavirus hotspots.
“For those areas where bans were in effect longer, there was a much more intensive increase in coronavirus, likely because the returning population was now more likely to be infected, having been trapped in the hotspot longer," he added.
Fiona Burlig, one of the co-authors of the study said, “There may be merit in letting people go home early, and indeed encouraging them to do so, rather than forcing them to stay.”
She also added that getting the duration of the domestic travel restrictions wrong is easy because it is not possible to "predict in advance what the optimal length should be, and in a democracy, such restrictions cannot be easily sustained.”
Courtesy:India Today