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54 Eur. J.L. & Econ. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/eurjlwec54 and id is 1 raw text is: European Journal of Law and Economics (2022) 54:1-4 https:Ildoi.org/l 0.1007/s10657-022-09746-5 EDITORIAL COVID 19: how coercive were the coercive measures taken to fight the pandemic Alain Marciano' . Giovanni Battista Ramello2 Accepted: 6 July 2022 / Published online: 13 July 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022 JEL codes D78 - 131 - H51 - K00 At the beginning of 2020, we started to hear about a new virus: COVID 19. Actually, COVID 19 is the name of a disease-coronavirus disease 19-that is caused by a new form of coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2. The first cases of persons affected by this virus lived in the city of Wuhan in China. Then, the disease rapidly spread all around the world, so rapidly that in March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. It actually seemed that it was a pandemic since a few weeks already and many governments had already taken measures to control the spread of the disease. At the end of January 2020, the state of emergency was declared in Italy, then it spread across the world as rapidly as the virus. As Christian Bjornskov and Stefan Voigt remind us in their article, By May 10, 2020, 99 govern- ments, equal to almost precisely half of all sovereign governments, had declared a state of emergency (SOE) due to COVID-19. This was unprecedented in human history. That was all the more shocking that the measures decided in this period con- sisted in limiting individual liberty. Fighting the pandemic with quarantines, partial or total lockdowns, curfews, and then masks. Most governments, facing the trade-off between human lives and liberty, indeed chose to save lives. E Alain Marciano alain marciano @umontpellier.fr Giovanni Battista Ramello giovannibattista.ramello @unito.it MRE and University of Montpellier, Department of Economics, Rue Raymond Dugrand, CS 79606, F-34960 MONTPELLIER, France 2 Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de Martiis, Universita di Torino, Lungodora Siena, 100, 10153 Torino, Italy Springer