Seminar · Epidemiology
Impact evaluation for COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions: what is (un)knowable?
Noah Haber · Stanford University
Thu, Jul 15, 2021 · 11:00 UTC
COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) policies have been one of the most important and contentious decisions of our time. Beyond even the "normal" inherent difficulties in impact evaluation with observational data, COVID-19 NPI policy evaluation is complicated by additional challenges related to infectious disease dynamics and lags, lack of direct observation of key outcomes, and a multiplicity of interventions occurring on an accelerated time scale. Randomized controlled trials also suffer from what is feasible and ethical to randomize as well as the sheer scale, scope, time, and res