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Abstract:
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With a variety of local, state, and even national COVID-19 related policies being implemented across the country and world, there is an opportunity to learn about the relative effectiveness of those policies, to guide policymaking during the current pandemic and beyond. However, accurately estimating policy effects is challenging. Beyond the issues that are faced for any policy, such as lack of randomization and difficulties in disentangling underlying time trends from a policy effect, evaluation of COVID-19 policies 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. This lunch discussion will provide a high-level overview of the key designs and considerations when estimating policy effects, recent advances in statistical methods to estimate policy effects, and lessons for statisticians when engaging in policy evaluation and the communication of evaluation findings to the media and general public.
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