Question

78. Different states and counties are in the process of relaxing non-pharmaceutical interventions (i.e. social distancing) for the COVID-19 response. Please explain how you would setup a natural experiment to measure the effectiveness of different non-pharmaceutical interventions. Please write a hypothesis and how you would test the hypothesis. explain briefly

Answer 1

The purpose of non-pharmaceutical measures is to decrease the spread of the disease i.e. to decrease the rate of increase of COVID19 infections.

Hence, the alternate hypothesis is that:

HA: Pharmaceutical measures decrease the rate of infections.

And the null hypothesis will be the negation of this. Specifically,

H0: Pharmaceutical measures do not decrease the rate of infections.

We know that the mean time that a person takes to develop symptoms is around 14 days.

Hence, to check for the effectiveness of the measure used, we have to monitor the changes after 14 days. We then need to compare the number of cases after and before the measure has been enforced. However, this is not an appropriate measure, since cases can be reported more simply because of increased testing. Thus, we need to get a normalized rate. This can be obtained by dividing the number of cases by the number of tests done. We can then compare this normalized case count before and after the measure.

If the difference is statistically signficant, we can reject the null. Otherwise, we assume the null and conclude that the non-pharmaceutical measure was ineffective

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