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

Rahi Abouk; Babak Heydari

Mobility Trend Data We use Google-released aggregated, anonymized daily location data on movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places for the month of March 2020 9 . The data are gathered by Google from users who have enabled the Location History setting on their accounts and are the same data used by Google Maps to track human traffic at various restaurants and other locations. The data include mobility trends for six location categories including retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential. These data were publicly released on April 2, 2020, in a form of charts that plot country-specific mobility trends and the percentage of changes with respect to a baseline in the period of Feb 16 to March 29. The US data also include mobility trends at the level of states and counties. Given that most intervention policies are implemented state-wide, we base our analysis at the state level. Each movement trend includes multiple data points per day. We aggregated these points to get a single mobility index per day for each trend chart. We should note that these data do not include people without phones, people not carrying their phones to places, etc. However, it is unlikely that the COVID-19 policies affect changes in recorded behavior. Overall, in most cases we have data on