The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 6.4 million registered deaths to date and has had a profound impact on economic activity. Here, we study the interaction of transmission, mortality, and the economy during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic from January 2020 to December 2022 across 25 European countries. We adopt a Bayesian Mixed Effects model with auto-regressive terms. We find that increases in disease transmission intensity decreases Gross domestic product (GDP) and increases daily excess deaths, with a longer lasting impact on excess deaths in comparison to GDP, which recovers more rapidly. Broadly, our results reinforce the intuitive phenomenon that significant economic activity arises from diverse person-to-person interactions. We report on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on transmission intensity, excess deaths, and changes in GDP, and resulting implications for policy makers. Our results highlight a complex cost-benefit trade off from individual NPIs. For example, banning international travel increases GDP and reduces excess deaths. We consider country random effects and their associations with excess changes in GDP and excess deaths. For example, more developed countries in Europe typically had more cautious approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, prioritising healthcare, and excess deaths over economic performance. Long term economic impairments are not fully captured by our model, as well as long term disease effects (Long Covid). Our results highlight that the impact of disease on a country is complex and multifaceted, and simple heuristic conclusions to extract the best outcome from the economy and disease burden are challenging.

翻译：COVID-19大流行迄今已导致超过640万例注册死亡，并对经济活动产生了深远影响。本研究分析了2020年1月至2022年12月期间，25个欧洲国家在SARS-CoV-2大流行中传播强度、死亡率与经济之间的交互作用。我们采用带有自回归项的贝叶斯混合效应模型。研究发现，疾病传播强度的增加会降低国内生产总值（GDP），并增加每日超额死亡人数，且对超额死亡的影响持续时间长于GDP——GDP恢复更为迅速。总体而言，我们的结果强化了一个直观现象：显著的经济活动源于多样化的人际互动。我们报告了非药物干预措施（NPIs）对传播强度、超额死亡人数和GDP变化的影响，以及由此对政策制定者产生的启示。结果凸显了单项非药物干预措施复杂的成本效益权衡。例如，禁止国际旅行既提高GDP又减少超额死亡。我们考虑了国家随机效应及其与超额GDP变化和超额死亡人数的关联。例如，欧洲较发达国家在COVID-19大流行中通常采取更为谨慎的策略，优先保障医疗保健和减少超额死亡而非追求经济表现。我们的模型未能完全捕捉长期经济损伤以及疾病长期影响（长新冠）。研究结果表明，疾病对国家的影响复杂且多面，从经济与疾病负担中提取最优结果的简单启发式结论面临挑战。