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

Rahi Abouk; Babak Heydari

We performed this study on those policies that aim at social distancing, which we divide into six categories: statewide stay-home order, other stay-home orders, non-essential business closure, large gatherings ban, school closure mandate, and restaurant and bar limits. Other stay-home orders incorporates stay-at-home orders for the senior population as well as those targeting specific cities or counties within a given state. Besides these policies, some states have implemented other COVID-19 policies such as cost-sharing waivers for testing or treatment or mandatory quarantine for travelers that we do not consider in this study. Figure 1 Temperature Data To control for the impact of temperature variation on human mobility, we construct daily temperature for each state by taking web scraping daily temperature data for the top 5 biggest cities in each state from the Weather Underground, a commercial weather service that provides real-time weather information. We calculated an aggregate daily temperature for each state by taking the average of daily temperatures of top 5 cities weighted by their populations. Table 1 shows the summary statistics for these three categories of data. 1 Here we assume that large indoor gathering at residential places has not increased substantially since the start of the outbreak.