Social distancing merely stabilized COVID‐19 in the US

Wagner, Aaron B.; Hill, Elaine L.; Ryan, Sean E.; Sun, Ziteng; Deng, Grace; Bhadane, Sourbh; Martinez, Victor Hernandez; Wu, Peter; Li, Dongmei; Anand, Ajay; Acharya, Jayadev; Matteson, David S.

Social distancing measures have been imposed across the US in order to stem the spread of COVID‐19. We quantify the reduction in doubling rate, by state, that is associated with this intervention. Using the earlier of K‐12 school closures and restaurant closures, by state, to define the start of the intervention, and considering daily confirmed cases through April 23rd, 2020, we find that social distancing is associated with a statistically‐significant (p < 0.01) reduction in the doubling rate for all states except for Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when controlling for false discovery, with the doubling rate averaged across the states falling from 0.302 (0.285, 0.320) days(‐1) to 0.010 (‐0.007, 0.028) days(‐1). However, we do not find that social distancing has made the spread subcritical. Instead, social distancing has merely stabilized the spread of the disease. We provide an illustration of our findings for each state, including estimates of the effective reproduction number, R, both with and without social distancing. We also discuss the policy implications of our findings.