Researchers: Ronen Arbel¹, Joseph Pliskin²

Background: Measures employed to combat COVID-19 included public lockdowns and vaccination campaigns. Israel’s extensive public health system produced data which showed the real-world results of these measures.

Objectives: 1) Evaluation of the health and economic outcomes of the measures to cope with Covid-19. 2) Discover the method that provides reasonable cost-effectiveness.

Method: Publicly available datasets from the Israeli Ministry of Health were used to model the mortality, infection rates, vaccination rates and additional parameters of the pandemic in Israel. Additional data from global sources were examined as well including data from the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, which was used for quantitative data on government policies. Data on the Israeli economy were taken from the Central Bureau of Statistics. Disparate datasets were cleaned, processed, and combined. Various exploratory analysis techniques from visualizations to complex regressions were applied.

Findings: Our models demonstrate that the first lockdown prevented 1,022 Covid-19 deaths at a cost 36.4-38.6 Billion NIS. The second lockdown prevented 1,970 Covid-19 deaths and cost 18-21 Billion NIS. These lifesaving effects were observed with a time lag from the declaration of lockdown. The massive vaccination campaign cost 1Billion NIS and prevented 4,750 Covid-19 deaths. Therefore, the cost per prevented death is 10-36 million NIS with a national lockdown versus 210,000 NIS with massive vaccination.

Conclusions: Both lockdowns and vaccination campaigns were effective at lowering Covid-19 deaths. The cost to avoid one Covid-19 death is with massive elderly vaccination is 50-180 lower than with a lockdown.

Recommendations: Policies which target the elderly population for vaccines are both lifesaving and cost-effective.

Research end date: 11/2021