COVID-19: New Epimodels for Stata package bridges the gap between epidemiological and economic modelling

The COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis has called economists to consider the economic implications of the pandemic in terms of macroeconomic and microeconomic outcomes such as the impact on GDP growth, or the impact on the labor market and poverty. Unlike standard economic modelling, understanding the economic implications of COVID-19 requires modelling the characteristics of the epidemics, a specialty more likely to be found among epidemiologists, mathematicians and statisticians.  Yet, it is essential to model the epidemiological outcomes of COVID-19 before any economic modelling can be applied as economic outcomes largely depend on epidemiological outcomes.

Epimodels is a new statistical package for Stata that contributes to bridging the gap between epidemiological and economic modelling. Epimodels implements mathematical simulations of the well- established SIR and SEIR epidemiological models of spread of contagious diseases. The package allows for specifying the exogenous parameters of the epidemics and initial conditions, then performs simulations and plots the results. It can assist in modeling the spread and analysis of impact of contagious diseases, as well as shed light on the effectiveness and timeliness of policies that governments may introduce to fight the epidemics. As a Stata package, Epimodels can be integrated with any other economic modelling suite available for Stata or can just be used as an interactive command.

Epimodels is available for download from Statistical Software Components (aka SSC) at Boston College Department of Economics. To install, type in Stata: ssc install epimodels.