After the lockdown: simulating mobility, public health and economic recovery scenarios

The spread of SARS-COV-2 has affected many economic and social systems. This paper aims at estimating the impact on regional productive systems in Italy of the interplay between the epidemic and the mobility restriction measures put in place to contain the contagion. We focus then on the economic consequences of alternative lockdown lifting schemes. We leverage a massive dataset of human mobility which describes daily movements of over four million individuals in Italy and we model the epidemic spreading through a metapopulation SIR model, which provides the fraction of infected individuals in each Italian district. To quantify economic backslashes this information is combined with socio-economic data. We then carry out a scenario analysis to model the transition to a post-lockdown phase and analyze the economic outcomes derived from the interplay between (a) the timing and intensity of the release of mobility restrictions and (b) the corresponding scenarios on the severity of virus transmission rates. Using a simple model for the spreading disease and parsimonious assumptions on the relationship between the infection and the associated economic backlashes, we show how different policy schemes tend to induce heterogeneous distributions of losses at the regional level depending on mobility restrictions. Our work shed lights on how recovery policies need to balance the interplay between mobility flows of disposable workers and the diffusion of contagion.