  The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 6.4 million registered deaths to date
and has had a profound impact on economic activity. Here, we study the
interaction of transmission, mortality, and the economy during the SARS-CoV-2
pandemic from January 2020 to December 2022 across 25 European countries. We
adopt a Bayesian Mixed Effects model with auto-regressive terms. We find that
increases in disease transmission intensity decreases Gross domestic product
(GDP) and increases daily excess deaths, with a longer lasting impact on excess
deaths in comparison to GDP, which recovers more rapidly. Broadly, our results
reinforce the intuitive phenomenon that significant economic activity arises
from diverse person-to-person interactions. We report on the effectiveness of
non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on transmission intensity, excess
deaths, and changes in GDP, and resulting implications for policy makers. Our
results highlight a complex cost-benefit trade off from individual NPIs. For
example, banning international travel increases GDP and reduces excess deaths.
We consider country random effects and their associations with excess changes
in GDP and excess deaths. For example, more developed countries in Europe
typically had more cautious approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, prioritising
healthcare, and excess deaths over economic performance. Long term economic
impairments are not fully captured by our model, as well as long term disease
effects (Long Covid). Our results highlight that the impact of disease on a
country is complex and multifaceted, and simple heuristic conclusions to
extract the best outcome from the economy and disease burden are challenging.
