When Will The Coronavirus Lockdowns Be Lifted? Here Are One Bank’s Estimates
With most of the developed world on lockdown, and markets and economies paralyzed until there is a material decline in new coronavirus cases, i.e., until we slide “over the hump” of the coronavirus curve, the biggest question – and variable – in assessing the economic damage unleashed by the covid-19 virus is the length of the lockdowns now in force, with Deutsche Bank’s Luke Templeman pointing out that “politicians and health officials have discussed dates ranging anywhere from weeks to over a year.”
In an attempt to answer this most important for capital markets question, namely when will the civic and economic restrictions begin to be lifted in various key countries, Deutsche Bank provides some estimates largely based on the experience of the lockdown and reopening in China’s Hubei province.
Using the “Chinese” experience as indicative of what other countries can achieve, recent studies have confirmed that after implementing various suppression measures, several large countries “appear to be converging onto the decline in the daily growth rate of deaths” seen in China. An Imperial College study in particular pointed out that the overall number of deaths in other countries could be between two and eight times the number of deaths as in China.
As DB notes, one way to look at how other countries are converging on the experience in Hubei province, China is shown in the following chart. As the German bank explains, it uses “a three-day comparison in order to filter out the noise from sudden jumps and drops when figures were relatively small. We also start each time series at the point at which restrictions were introduced to attempt a closer comparison. We then show all the countries individually against the Hubei experience.”
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