Shut it down: a cross country panel analysis on the efficacy of lockdown measures

Coronavirus pandemic outbreak from China in the December 2019 and since then has quickly spread all over the world. National governments introduced policies aimed to reduce the probability to contract the virus, such as lockdown measures, in order to limit the outbreak. Lockdown fostered a debate about the effective need and the optimal duration of such measures. Indeed, these policies have a high price, being characterized by the alt of many productive activities. The aim of this note is to provide preliminary evidences about the efficacy of lockdown measures all over the world, by the means of a panel data quantitative analysis. Our results confirm the efficacy of such measures, and that the average time to have effects in terms of a reduction of cases is of about ten days. Furthermore the beneficial effects of a lockdown keep reducing the new cases with a linear trend for at least the ten successive days.