Analyzing Lockdown Policies and Their Effectiveness in Romania and Hungary

Abstract

There has been a debate on the efficiency of lockdown policies worldwide, and several researchers have studied this aspect by trying to implement different statistical models. The aim of the research was to compare two countries with similar lockdown policies and observe the impact of the total lockdown policy on the spread of the COVID-19 disease. Taking in consideration that the total lockdown in Romania lasted for 52 days and in Hungary for 54 days, we would like to see how the infection rate changed with every week of the lockdown by obtaining an average for every week (7 days) divided by the total lockdown days in each country. The values that we took in consideration are as follows: the daily infected cases, the daily infected cases/million, the daily cases of death and the daily cases of death/million in both countries. We tried to apply the same rule after the end of the total lockdown and observe the outcomes. The results showed that the minimum number of days to observe the effects of total lockdown and the effects after the lockdown was 21 (3 weeks) in both countries.

Keywords

• coronavirus
• COVID-19
• health policy
• lockdown