Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis

Objectives

While highly effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 spread, national lockdowns come with an enormous economic price. Few countries have adopted an alternative “testing, tracing, and isolation” approach to selectively isolate people at high exposure risk, thereby minimizing the economic impact. To assist policy makers, we performed a cost-effectiveness analysis of these two strategies.

Methods

A modified Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered and Deceased (SEIRD) model was employed to assess the situation in Israel, a small country with ~9 million people. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of these strategies, as well as the expected number of infected individuals and deaths were calculated.

Results

A nationwide lockdown is expected to save on average 274 (median 124, interquartile range (IQR): 71-221) lives compared to the “testing, tracing, and isolation” approach. However, the ICER will be on average $45,104,156 (median $ 49.6 million, IQR: 22.7-220.1) to prevent one case of death.

Conclusions

A national lockdown has a moderate advantage in saving lives with tremendous costs and possible overwhelming economic effects. These findings should assist decision-makers dealing with additional waves of this pandemic.

Highlights

• Drastic measures of national lockdowns are taken by many countries to slow-down SARS-CoV-2 spread. However, these measures have detrimental economic effects.

• Here we compare two strategies to control the epidemic using a modified SEIRD model: 1. Global national lockdown 2. Focused isolation of people at high exposure risk, following detailed epidemiological investigations.

• We show that strategy 1 is modestly superior in saving lives compared to strategy 2, but with tremendous costs to prevent one case of death. This might result in overwhelming economic effects that are expected to increase future death toll.