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

Rahi Abouk; Babak Heydari

The success of social distancing policies can be evaluated on two fronts. A primary goal of these policies is to decrease the time people spend outside of their homes. In this study, we use the time people spend at residential locations (referred here as presence at home as a proxy to measure the success level of this goal 1 . Besides encouraging people to stay at home, social distancing policies also intend on keeping people away from crowded locations and large gatherings, even when they go out. We use the impact of policies on the changes in the remaining five location categories (i.e. retail, transit stations, parks ,and work places). Given that these categories do not cover all possible gathering places (e.g. places of worship), we base our findings mainly on the impact of policies on presence at home, but discuss all other categories, acknowledging this limitation.