Coronavirus in Latin America. Analysis of the measures adopted by 14 Latin American governments in the different phases of the pandemic

ZACHARÍAS, DANIELA; RATTO, MARÍA CELESTE; AZERRAT JUAN MARTÍN INTI; CABRERA, JUAN

Workshop; ?Public Policy, Opinions, Behavior, and Health Outcomes during the COVID Pandemic? Workshop Part II; 2020

Texas A&M University - European Union Center - University of São Paulo Department of Political Science - Vienna University of Economics and Business

Corona virus pandemic has left more than 30 million confirmed cases and one milliondeaths. The challenge has been enormous, different governments have adopteddiverse measures in order to reduce the number of new infections and deaths, and theconsequences in economic terms. The scenarios have been changing and successfulstrategies have to change because they loose effectiveness or became obsolete. Theaim of this paper is to analyze the effects that different kinds of measures taken by thegovernments had on the daily new cases. The main hypothesis of this work is that theeffect of the government responses to Covid-19 has varied throughout the differentphases of the pandemic. The countries analyzed were Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Panamá, Peru,Paraguay, República Dominicana and Uruguay. A Time Series Cross Section analysiswas performed, to allows studying the evolution of the number of daily cases over timeand by country. The period of time studied is from the day the first case of corona viruswas registered in a country, until September 14, 2020. We used data from COVID-19Dashboard database of Johns Hopkins University, and the Oxford COVID-19Government Response Tracker dataset.