Did the COVID-19 pandemic change the willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases in Europe?

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for effective infectious disease outbreak prevention. This could entail installing an integrated, international early warning system, aiming to contain and mitigate infectious diseases outbreaks. The amount of resources governments should spend on such preventive measures can be informed by the value citizens attach to such a system. This was already recognized in 2018, when a contingent valuation willingness to pay (WTP) experiment was fielded, eliciting the WTP for such a system in six European countries. We replicated that experiment in the spring of 2020 to test whether and how WTP had changed during an actual pandemic (COVID-19), taking into account differences in infection rates and stringency of measures by government between countries. Over

SUBMITTER: Himmler S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8294297 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature