The Effect of Large-Scale Anti-Contagion Policies on the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

Solomon Hsiang; Daniel Allen; Sebastien Annan-Phan; Kendon Bell; Ian Bolliger; Trinetta Chong; Hannah Druckenmiller; Andrew Hultgren; Luna Yue Huang; Emma Krasovich; Peiley Lau; Jaecheol Lee; Esther Rolf; Jeanette Tseng; Tiffany Wu

China We acquired epidemiological data from an open source GitHub project 1 that scrapes time series data from Ding Xiang Yuan. We extended this dataset back in time to January 10 by manually collecting official daily statistics from the central and provincial (Hubei, Guangdong, and Zhejiang) Chinese government websites. We compiled policies by collecting data on the start dates of travel bans and lockdowns at the city-level from the "2020 Hubei lockdowns" Wikipedia page 2 , the Wuhan Coronavirus Timeline project on Github 3 , and various other news reports. As we suspect that most Chinese cities have been treated by at least one anti-contagion policy, due to their reported trends in infections, we have dropped cities where we cannot find a policy deployment date to avoid miscategorizing the policy status of cities.