Recovering from the Covid-19 crisis. Insights from an Epidemionomic Approach

Managing the Covid-19 crisis is often perceived as finding the right balance between saving lives and saving the economy or, to put in crude terms, between epidemiologists and economists’ priorities. The problem is more subtle and complex. In many countries such as Luxembourg, lockdown and social distancing measures were perceived as necessary to flatten the infection curve and to avoid a public health disaster… at the cost of a sizeable cut in economic output. Nothing could be less certain as a collapse of the health care system alone could have generated panic, a systemic crash of the whole international debt network, and an even more severe economic recession. As policymakers have been implementing many measures to restart the economy, the fear of a painful tradeoff recurs.