The Effect of Stay-at-Home Orders on COVID-19 Infections in the United States

James H. Fowler; Seth J. Hill; Nick Obradovich; Remy Levin

Here, we study the role of stay-at-home orders, perhaps the most common policy intervention in the United States and Europe. Stay-at-home orders require citizens to shelter in their residence with very few exceptions, and they have typically been implemented along with school closures, bans on mass gatherings, and closure of non-essential businesses. These policies are associated with a significant reduction in observed mobility, 14 and initial evidence from New York City suggests that they can be effective in reducing case growth in the United States. 15 Yet, because each locality in the U.S. has many factors that contribute to differential rates of transmission, statistical efforts to control for potential confounds and to identify the precise effects of stay-at-home orders are critical to understanding whether --and to what degree --such policies are working.