COVID-19 – Role of Government Intervention

Abstract

The ravage of COVID-19 has remained unprecedented in the history of human civilization. The pandemic has bewildered the governments across the nations amidst the twin edge blade of economic stringency or unabated growth of the disease. The study has attempted to find the efficacy of GovernmentIntervention (GI) incombating the forces of the pandemic. Ithas pooled historical data of victims of 13 most affected countries after smoothening the data with ARIMA(p,q,r) technique to formulate an exponential model for its spread. The model considers six explanatory variables including GI to understand the dynamics of the disease. The historical data of the countries pooled across continents to have six groups. While variance inflation factorused for detecting multicollinearity, multivariate regression model adopted to determine the association between the explanatory variables and COVID-19 growth. The study pivoted on finding the role of GI, looking at its association with COVID-19 spread. Comparability analysis of the coefficient of GI conducted across the models to find the intensity across the continents. The study finds GI an effective instrument in the continents of America (North), America (South) and Asia, conducive for buying time for herd immunity and invention of vaccine and/or medicine.