The purpose of this Master's thesis is to understand the differences in the epidemiological success of the measures for mitigating the Covid-19 epidemics in various countries and identify factors that explain the differences. To this end, we design a framework for the analysis of the government interventions’ success from epidemiological data. The analysis is based on a basic comparison of the epidemiological data from 133 countries worldwide, including 41 European countries. We also perform a more advanced, detailed comparison of data on government interventions in eleven European countries selected with resect to different European social models.
Our research was conducted using Spearman’s correlation analysis using the factors influencing the epidemiological success of measures (number of deceased and infected by Covid-19, number of measures, population density, etc.). For the final analysis of the individual adopted government interventions, we have used the calculations of the interventions’ impact on the trends of epidemiological performance using a predefined five-level scale.
The research finds that the trust of the people towards their public, governmental institutions has a very large impact on the success of the governments’ interventions. Consequently, in all the countries with high trust, simple preventive measures show high rates of success. Our analysis also shows that the success of the epidemiological measures does not depend nor is connected on the density of population nor the number of interventions in a country. We can finally confirm that not all measures are equally successful and that the same measures are more successful in countries with a higher trust in public institutions.
The Master thesis gives the decision-makers a tool they can use to analyze their epidemiological interventions and simply compare them with the suitable representative from the European social models. The developed tool identifies elements that must be taken into account to increase the trust of the people to the public institutions in the medium term, and hence help improve the country’s performance to overcome the epidemic of this or any other new viruses that may appear in the future. To the citizens, the tool offers an answer on how well the decision-makers in their country performed and whether they have justified their trust.
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