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Saving Lives and Livelihoods Amidst a Once-in-a-Century Crisis 7

Figure 3: Wide Variation in Critical Parameters of COVID-19

3(a): CFR as on 31 March 2020 3(b): Basic Reproduction Number (R )
st
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Source: Compiled from various sources

1.11 When faced with enormous uncertainty, policies must be designed with the
objective of minimizing large losses by selecting the policy that would be optimal
under the worst-case scenario (Hansen and Sargent, 2001). This assumed significance
given the significant uncertainty around the critical parameters that a priori made it
difficult for policy makers to weigh the health benefits of various strategies against
their economic damages (Barnett et al, 2020). COVID-19, therefore, presented before
the world in March 2020 the predicament of which strategy to choose and whether to
save ‘lives’ or ‘livelihoods’.

Higher Speed of Transmission Potential in Dense Areas
1.12 The virus would be transmitted faster when people live in close vicinity or work in
close physical proximity in factories, or in service sectors with face-to-face interactions
with the public (Box 2). Two important factors that, then, become significant are the
absolute population and population density. This is because higher the proxmity between
people, higher is the likelihood that an infected person carrying the virus will make
contact with a susceptible person. Transmission events occur through contacts made
between susceptible and infectious individuals in either the household, workplace, school
or randomly in the community, with the latter depending on spatial distance between
contacts. This is evident in the spread of COVID-19 wherein countries with higher
population have shown higher caseloads and higher fatalities while countries with higher
population density have shown higher caseloads though fatalities do not vary much with
population density (Figure 4).