Event Study Design for Modeling Early Relaxation in Turkish Public with COVID-19 Vaccine

Abstract

Objective: Vaccination is crucial to fighting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. A large body of literature investigates the effect of the initiation of the COVID-19 vaccination in case numbers in Turkey including the resistance and willingness to taking the vaccine. The effect of early relaxation in the Turkish public with the initiation of vaccination on new daily cases is unknown. Methods: This study performs an event study analysis to explore the pre-relaxation effect of vaccination on the Turkish public by using daily data of new cases stringency index and residential mobility. Two events are comparatively defined as the vaccination of the health personnel (Event 1) and the citizens age 65 and over (Event 2). The initial dates of these events are January 13 and February 12 2021 respectively. The length of the estimation window is determined as 14 days for the 2 events. To represent only the early stages of the vaccination the study period ends on April 12 2021. Thus whereas the event window of Event 1 includes 90 observations Event 2 covers 60 observations. Results: While average values of residential mobility stringency index and daily numbers of cases are 15.36 71.03 and 11 978.93 in the estimation window for Event 1 these averages are 8.89 70.88 and 17 303.20 in the event window. For Event 2 the same average values are 9.14 69.38 and 7 664.93 in the estimation window and 8.25 71.12 and 22 319.10 in the event window. When 14-day abnormal growth rates of the daily number of cases for Event 1 and Event 2 are compared it is observed that Event 1 has negative growth rates initially and reaches a 7.59% growth at most. On the other hand Event 2 starts with a 1.11% growth rate and having a steady increase it reaches a 23.70% growth in the last 14 days of the study period. Conclusion: The preliminary result shows that despite taking more strict governmental measures while residential mobility decreases the daily number of COVID-19 cases increases in the early stages of vaccination compared to short pre-periods of it. This indicates that the initiation of vaccination leads to early behavioral relaxation in public. Moreover the effect of Event 2 on the case numbers is more significant and immediate compared to that of Event 1 which may be linked to the characteristic of the Turkish culture being more sensitive to the older adult population. © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.