New Academic Article Explores the Cost of COVID-19 Pandemic

This week, an article was posted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on the cost of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The article explores the various expenses incurred from the pandemic, including unemployment insurance claims, lost gross domestic product (GDP), premature death, long-term health impairment, and mental health impairment. In total, the article estimates the total cost of the pandemic to exceed $16 trillion, or approximately 90 percent of the annual GDP of the United States.

The article concludes that “policies that can materially reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 have enormous social value,” namely through widescale population testing, contact tracing, and isolation. Authors determine significant cost savings could be generated through such public health activities, finding that projected economic returns from test-and-trace strategies is approximately 30 times the cost.

The full article on the pandemic costs is available here.