Professor Spyros Galanis spyros.galanis@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Group Testing and Social Distancing
Galanis, Spyros
Authors
Abstract
An often overlooked strategy for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic is group testing. Its main advantage is that it can scale, enabling the regular testing of the whole population. We argue that another advantage is that it can induce social distancing. Using a simple model, we show that if a group tests positive and its members are in close social proximity, then they will rationally choose not to meet. The driving force is the uncertainty about who has the virus and the fact that the group cares about its collective welfare. We therefore propose identifying socially connected groups, such as colleagues, friends and neighbours, and testing them regularly.
Citation
Galanis, S. (2021). Group Testing and Social Distancing. National Institute Economic Review, 257, 36-45. https://doi.org/10.1017/nie.2021.26
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jul 9, 2021 |
Online Publication Date | Sep 30, 2021 |
Publication Date | 2021 |
Deposit Date | Sep 8, 2021 |
Publicly Available Date | Sep 9, 2021 |
Journal | National Institute Economic Review |
Print ISSN | 0027-9501 |
Electronic ISSN | 1741-3036 |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 257 |
Pages | 36-45 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1017/nie.2021.26 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1235302 |
Files
Published Journal Article
(187 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Accepted Journal Article
(304 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Copyright Statement
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of National Institute Economic Review
You might also like
Six Easy Models of International Trade Theory
(2018)
Book
Information Aggregation Under Ambiguity: Theory and Experimental Evidence
(2024)
Journal Article
The value of information under unawareness
(2015)
Journal Article
Admissibility and event-rationality
(2013)
Journal Article
Speculative trade and the value of public information
(2021)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search