Response to Peter Berman’s Commentary on “Consideration of Trade-offs Regarding COVID-19 Containment Measures in the United States: Implications for Canada,” by Mayvis Rebeira and Eric Nauenberg

Abstract

We are grateful to Dr. Berman for raising important points when analyzing an economy-wide crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. We agree with Dr. Berman that COVID-19 had different behavioural responses from different groups; thus the best that can be done is to estimate average effects. To understand the impact by different groups would necessitate information that in these circumstances was unavailable. Further, these groups could have behaved differently between the pre- and post-vaccine eras. Though average effects do not take into account the possible wide distribution of the effectiveness of the containment strategies in different groups, we think they provide a reasonable source of evidence in a crisis situation where data is often sparse and the situation is dynamic...

Keywords

• covid-19
• containment strategies
• lockdown
• value-for-money
• economic evaluation