NBER Publications by Megumi Kasajima

In June 2009, the World Health Organization declared that novel influenza A (nH1N1) had reached pandemic status worldwide. The response to the spread of this virus by the public and by the public health community was immediate and widespread. Among the responses included voluntary avoidance of public spaces, closure of schools, the ubiquitous placement of hand sanitizer, and the use of face masks in public places. Existing forecasting models of the epidemic spread of nH1N1, used by public health officials to aid in making many decisions including vaccination policy, ignore avoidance responses in the formal modeling. In this paper, we build a forecasting model of the nH1N1 epidemic that explicitly accounts for avoidance behavior. We use data from the U.S. summer and the Australian wint...