Deaths due to COVID-19, Lockdowns, Vaccinations and Weather Temperatures: The Case of Greece

The aim of this paper is to present Greek daily descriptive statistics on confirmed deaths due to COVID-19, the days of lockdown and their effect on the number of deaths, the outcomes of vaccinations and the influence of weather temperatures. Do lockdowns work in bringing the number of deaths down? The descriptive evidence shows that this is the case even though there is a considerable lagged effect. On the other hand, vaccinations, during the time period of examination, do not seem to have diminished the number of deaths, but the reason might be that it takes time for their full effect to occur. Finally, this paper also examines the hypothesis that during the summer months the daily deaths from COVID-19 are relatively lower than during the winter months. Using average daily weather temperatures, this hypothesis cannot be falsified. Simple calculations of the functional relation between weather temperatures and deaths show that temperatures above 28.5 degrees Celsius (°C) were associated with zero deaths. Keywords: COVID-19, deaths, Greece, lockdown, pandemic, vaccinations, weather temperatures