A database of US state policies to mitigate COVID-19 and its economic consequences

Abstract

Background Since COVID-19 first appeared in the United States (US) in January 2020, US states have pursued a wide range of policies to mitigate the spread of the virus and its economic ramifications. Without unified federal guidance, states have been the front lines of the policy response. Main text We created the COVID-19 US State Policy (CUSP) database (https://statepolicies.com/) to document the dates and components of economic relief and public health measures issued at the state level in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Documented interventions included school and business closures, face mask mandates, directives on vaccine eligibility, eviction moratoria, and expanded unemployment insurance benefits. By providing continually updated information, CUSP was designed to inform rapid-response, policy-relevant research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been widely used to investigate the impact of state policies on population health and health equity. This paper introduces the CUSP database and highlights how it is already informing the COVID-19 pandemic response in the US. Conclusion CUSP is the most comprehensive publicly available policy database of health, social, and economic policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. CUSP documents widespread variation in state policy decisions and implementation dates across the US and serves as a freely available and valuable resource to policymakers and researchers.

SPRC19: A Database of State Policy Responses to COVID-19 in the United States

“…SPRC19 is far from the first collection of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) available for the American states. Prominent examples of such collections include HIT-COVID 1 ; the COVID-19 Control Strategies List (CCCSL) 2 ; the COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet) 3 ; the COVID-19 US State Policy Database (CUSP) 4 , 5 ; the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) 6 ; the COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (COVID AMP) 7 ; and State-level social distancing policies in response to COVID-19 in the US 8 . As with other such collections such as these, SPRC19 has its relative advantages.…”

From Syringes to Dishes: Improving Food Security Through Vaccination

“…Specifically, states determine vaccine eligibility using plausibly exogenous age criteria. We obtain the eligibility data from the COVID-19 U.S. State Policy (CUSP) database (Raifman et al, 2020;Skinner et al, 2022). The data from CUSP has been used in multiple studies to determine the impact of age-specific vaccine eligibility on the likelihood of delaying or forgoing care (Aslim et al, 2022), mental health problems (Agrawal et al, 2021), risk mitigating behaviors or ex-ante moral hazard (Agrawal, Sood, and Whaley, 2022), as well as hospitalizations and deaths (Smits et al, 2022).…”

Interrupted time series analysis of drug overdose fatalities in service-related industries versus non-service-related industries during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2018–2021

“… 15 During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, typical workplaces for service workers, such as bars, restaurants and hotels, were over-represented among the establishments shut down in response to state executive orders. 16 Tourism ground to a halt, and, unlike many in the affected workforce, service workers could not work from home. Although federal aid allowed some establishments to avoid laying off their entire workforce, many financially precarious businesses did not survive the shutdown, and their employees lost their jobs.…”