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Plasma Shot and Market Design – proposed scheme now in practice

A promising new quasi-vaccine technology is to use anti-bodies from recovering covid-19 patients to provide vaccine-like protection. This technology is entering clinical trials. Effective supply is quite limited due to the need to acquire plasma from recovering patients: how to increase availabitity of COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) and how best to allocate it is studied by Scott Kominers, Parag Pathak, Tayfun Sönmez, and Utku Ünver. This research is a fusion of medical science and social science and illustrates the benefits of collaboration.

The researchers’ proposed incentive based scheme to increase access to CCP therapy has had remarkable impact latey, as the US-based Covid Plasma Initiave decided to adopt the scheme.

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“Optimal Management of an Epidemic”

Carlos Garriga, Rody Manuelli and Siddhartha Sanghi study a dynamic macro model to capture the trade-off between policies that simultaneously decrease output and the rate of infection transmission. Findings suggest that, in many cases, optimal policies require sharp initial decreases in employment followed by a partial liberalization that occurs before the peak of the epidemic. The study also discusses the impact of the arrival of a vaccine and its changing value as the epidemic progresses.

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Six-Country Survey on Covid-19

This paper presents a new data set collected on representative samples across 6 countries: China, South Korea, Japan, Italy, the UK and the four largest states in the US. The information collected relates to work and living situations, income, behavior (such as social-distancing, hand-washing and wearing a face mask), beliefs about the Covid 19 pandemic and exposure to the virus, socio-demographic characteristics and pre-pandemic health characteristics. (The data can be accessed here.)

Recommended citation: Michèle Belot, Syngjoo Choi, Julian C. Jamison, Nicholas W. Papageorge, Egon Tripodi, Eline van den Broek-Altenburg, Six-Country Survey on Covid-19, on: Covid-19 Research Conduit (May 2020), URL: http://www.covid-19-research-conduit.org/2020/05/06/six-country-survey-on-covid-19/.