The Immediate Effect of COVID-19 Policies on Social Distancing Behavior in the United States

Rahi Abouk; Babak Heydari

While most countries follow a central policy scheme in the current pandemic, the federal nature of the United States creates a suitable natural experiment setting to tackle these questions. In the United States and as of this writing, the federal government has left NPI decisions to individual states, creating a high level of variation in the type and timing of such policies 7 (See Figure 1 in the Data Section). While there are strong evidences for reduced social contact in the US, not all these reductions can be attributed to NPIs. In fact, mobility data show that people in most states had already started to reduce the time they spend outside of home before any NPI was implemented (See Figure AP.1 in the appendix).In fact, for some states such as Idaho, Missouri, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, people's presence at home had already increased close to a level of saturation before any social distancing policy went into effect. These pieces of evidence suggest that attributing current reductions in social interaction to policy measures can be misleading and further underscore the need for a formal study to disentangle the direct impact of NPIs from other factors such as awareness and spillover effects.