Better than Nothing?: Consequence of Incomplete Treatment of COVID-19

Abstract

With seemingly no end to the global pandemic in sight, high expectations are growing for the development of medicines to treat COVID-19, in addition to the vaccination which has been carried out recently. In Japan also, development of such medicines is accelerating and now four COVID-19 medicines have been approved.

There is, however, concern that the COVID-19 medicines are not always effective, so that, in the present paper, we investigate the consequence of incomplete treatment of COVID-19-infected patients by constructing a simple intertemporal theoretical model. Main result we obtained is that incomplete treatment of infected patients increases number of the infected people, which is equivalent to say “worse than nothing”.