Determinants of Effectiveness of Stay-At-Home against COVID-19

Abstract

Quarantines are basic public health policies against pandemics. The wide spread quarantines worldwide against COVID-19 have been dubbed as “great lockdown” as a reference to the great depression in 1929. While quarantines may save millions of lives by limiting the mobility of people and isolating infected individuals, they also result in massive economic disruptions. Therefore, quarantine policies must be science-based policies, which requires comprehensive knowledge about the mode of interactions among the members of the society. In addition, quarantines must be inclusive in the sense that it must treat different segments of the society equally. In case of the COVID-19 instances in the US, we observe that the effectiveness of stay-at-home measures vary intensely across the states. Therefore, we hypothesize that prevailing factors such as population density and mode of transportation might play the key role in the differences in effectiveness of stay-at-home measures. Utilizing differences-in-differences estimation methodology, we inspect the impact of changes in mobility and structural factors such as modes of transportation and population density on COVID-19 cases in the US. Our findings show that restricting mobility and implementing stay-at-home measure significantly lower COVID-19 cases. In addition, the states with lower vehicle ownership have considerably higher cases. Population density also plays an important role as higher population density causes higher infection and cases.