Economic shutdowns and travel restrictions have been widely used during the Covid-19 pandemic to control the rate of infection. Sometimes it helps; sometimes it does not. Health policies should, when possible, disrupt economic activity as little as possible, a team of researchers says.
Though primarily affected travel-related industries, such travel bans also negatively affect mobile industry revenues by reducing the amount of roaming revenue. People who are not traveling also are not using their phones out of their home regions. Early March 2020 forecasts were that mobile operators globally could lose $25 billion in roaming revenue.
In September 2020, research from roaming experts Kaleido Intelligence suggested a 53 percent fall in retail roaming revenues would happen in 2020. According to GSMA, that could represent a revenue hit of as much as four percent to eight percent.
Combined with other revenue deceleration from reduced new customer acquisitions and upgrades, TBR estimates average revenue growth could dip about six percent in the first half of 2020 alone. Some estimates suggest revenue losses could be far greater, approaching 20 percent in some cases.
The issue, some might say, is striking a balance between public health and economic health, especially unemployment and recession, with economic contraction between five percent and eight percent in 2020, compared to 2019.
The expected 2021 rate of recovery might also depend on how rapidly consumers are willing to resume “normal” life activities.
Stringent travel restrictions might have little impact on epidemic dynamics except in countries with low Covid-19 incidence and large numbers of arrivals from other countries, or where epidemics are close to tipping points for exponential growth, a team of researchers reports.
“In May, 2020, imported cases are likely to have accounted for a high proportion of total incidence in many countries, contributing more than 10 percent of total incidence in 102 (95 percent credible interval 63–129) of 136 countries when assuming no reduction in travel volumes (ie, with 2019 travel volumes) and in 74 countries (33–114) when assuming estimated 2020 travel volumes. Imported cases in September, 2020, would have accounted for no more than 10 percent of total incidence in 106 (50–140) of 162 countries and less than 1 percent in 21 countries (4–71) when assuming no reductions in travel volumes,” say researchers Timothy Russell, Sam Clifford, W. John Edmunds, Adam J Kucharski and Mark Jit, working on behalf of the Center for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases Covid-19 working group and published in the Lancet.
“Countries should consider local Covid-19 incidence, local epidemic growth, and travel volumes before implementing such restrictions,” they note. “Although such restrictions probably contribute to epidemic control in many countries, in others, imported cases are likely to contribute little to local Covid-19 epidemics.”
As a matter of science, travel bans might or might not have much material impact on rates of new Covid-19 infections. And the benefit has to be weighed against the costs of movement bans on economic performance, as any other public policy should be evaluated, one might argue.
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