Pandemic

On Thursday, February 25 from 12-1 pm, join us for a discussion on what UAA researchers have found on how contact tracing has impacted COVID-19 transmission, strategies for reaching out to vulnerable Alaskans, and plans to hear community voices on the impacts of COVID-19 in the Arctic.

On Thursday, January 28 join us for a discussion on what UAA researchers have found on how COVID-19 has impacted mask wearing in Anchorage, fishing decisions in Bristol Bay and how rural Alaskans describe their experience with the pandemic.

Faculty from UAA, including ISER’s Katie Cueva, have been working since the spring to describe the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on individual’s behavior, inform policy decisions, and predict case counts and contact tracing workforce needs.

ISER Professor Mouhcine Guettabi forecasts modest economic growth for the Alaska economy for 2021 and 2022.  However, he expects that this modest growth will not be enough for Alaska to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic shock.  Professor Guettabi projects that the economy in 2022 will still be 5% below the pre-pandemic level.  The forecast appears in a report entitled Alaska’s Economy and the pandemic, which was prepared for the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development (DCCED.)  The projection that Alaska’s economy will not fully recover by 2022 is consistent with similar Federal Reserve forecasts for the US economy.

ISER faculty are working to inform the Municipality of Anchorage's COVID-19 efforts through a partnership between ISER, the UAA Division of Population Health Sciences, and the UAA College of Arts and Sciences. The group is involved in three distinct projects. First, Dr. Cueva, Dr. DeFeo, and Dr. Berry contributed to a series of publications focusing on specific areas in which the pandemic has impacted Anchorage and its residents, with recommendations for monitoring further impacts and potential responses/interventions. Of the published papers, Dr. Cueva and Dr. DeFeo took the lead on Education; considering the pandemic’s effect on early childhood, K12, and postsecondary systems, they noted the impacts of school and facility closures on students and communities, and provided recommendations to limit negative outcomes and plan for the future. Dr. Berry authored a paper on the economic impact of the hunker down order.

Economists, both nationally and in Alaska, are frequently asked to assess the economic costs of the steps taken to limit the spread of COVID-19.  The economic impacts are huge; the US is experiencing rates of unemployment not seen since the 1930s in the Great Depression.  But the benefits of saving lives by reducing deaths due to COVID-10 area also very large.  In a recent a working paper, “The Impacts of the ‘Hunker Down’ order in Anchorage,” Assistant Professor Kevin Berry used the concept of the economic value of a statistical life to undertake an approximate comparison of the economic costs (in lost income) and economic benefits (in saved lives) of the Municipal response to the coronavirus outbreak.  His work combines epidemiological modeling of how COVID-19 could have spread without the Hunker Down order with the value of a “statistical life”.  The results suggest that the economic benefits of saving human lives to date has far exceeded the economic costs in lost income.

Kevin Berry, assistant professor of economics at ISER, writes in The Hill about the importance of long-term investments in health capacity to prevent and quickly respond to disease outbreaks, such as the recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.