Tracking the impact of government response to COVID-19 epidemic: Evidence from India

This paper tries to quantify the impact of government policy intervention on the death due to COVID-19 in India. I use the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), a longitudinal database of daily government response from Jan 28th, 2020, when the first COVID case was diagnosed in India till December 31st, 2022. Here government responses are captured in form of, stringency measures, containment measures, economic support measures, and the overall government support, providing a holistic assessment of the governments efforts in mitigating the viruss incidence. I quantify both the average relation and causality at the to understand the impacts of NPIs with COVID-19 incidence in terms of deaths and infections due to COVID-19. Short-term analysis reveals a significant relationship between various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and the logarithmic change in COVID-19 deaths. Higher infection rates are strongly associated with increased deaths, with positive coefficients. Stringent measures, containment actions, and economic support show negative coefficients, indicating that these interventions effectively reduce deaths in the short term. The overall government support, which aggregates all three NPIs, also demonstrates a significant negative effect on deaths, highlighting the importance of stringent and immediate measures in controlling the death toll early in the pandemic. In the long term, the analysis continues to emphasize the importance of infection rates and NPIs. Long-term coefficients for infection rates and various NPIs are consistently significant and negative, indicating that sustained interventions significantly reduce mortality over time. Specific measures like stringency, containment, and economic support show substantial negative impacts underscoring the long-term benefits of maintaining rigorous public health measures. Further, causality analysis confirms that relationship among government interventions and COVID-19 incidences were mostly bidirectional, meaning more deaths (or infections) leads to stricter interventions that in turn further reduce deaths. JELC23, C54, I18, I38