Covid-19 India prize (post with fixed links)

It goes to the COVIN Working Group for their paper “Adaptive control of COVID: Local, gradual, and trigger-based exit from lockdown in India.”

As India ends its lockdown, the team, led by Anup Malani, has developed a strategy to inform state policy using what is called an adaptive control strategy.  This adaptive control strategy has three parts.  First, introduction of activity should be done gradually.  States are still learning how people respond to policy and how COVID responds to behavior.  Small changes will allow states to avoid big mistakes.  Second, states should set and track epidemiological targets, such as reducing the reproductive rate below 1, and adjust social distancing every week or two to meet those targets.  Third, states should adopt different policies in different districts or city wards depending on the local conditions.

This project provides a path that allows states to contain epidemics in local areas and open up more of the economy.  Going forward the team plans to help address shocks such as recent flows of laborers out of cities and estimate how effective different social distancing policies are at reducing mobility and contact rates.

This project has 14 authors (Anup Malani, Satej Soman, Sam Asher, Clement Imbert, Vaidehi Tandel, Anish Agarwal, Abdullah Alomar, Arnab Sarker, Devavrat Shah, Dennis Shen, Jonathan Gruber, Stuti Sachdeva, David Kaiser, and Luis Bettencourt) across five institutions (University of Chicago Law School and Mansueto Institute, MIT Economics Department and Institute for Data Systems and Society, IDFC Institute, John Hopkins University SAIS, and University of Warwick Economics Department). 

Draft of the full paper is here. And for the visualizations see their website https://www.adaptivecontrol.org

Congrats to all the authors of the paper and their institutions.  And here are links to the previous Emergent Ventures anti-Covid prize winners.

And I thank Shruti for her help with this.