COVID Border Accountability Project, a hand-coded global database of border closures introduced during 2020

Abstract

Quantifying the timing and content of policy changes affecting international travel and immigration is key to ongoing research on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the socioeconomic impacts of border closures. The COVID Border Accountability Project (COBAP) provides a hand-coded dataset of >1000 policies systematized to reflect a complete timeline of country-level restrictions on movement across international borders during 2020. Trained research assistants used pre-set definitions to source, categorize and verify for each new border policy: start and end dates, whether the closure is “complete” or “partial”, which exceptions are made, which countries are banned, and which air/land/sea borders were closed. COBAP verified the database through internal and external audits from public health experts. For purposes of further verification and future data mining efforts of pandemic research, the full text of each policy was archived. The structure of the COBAP dataset is designed for use by social and biomedical scientists. For broad accessibility to policymakers and the public, our website depicts the data in an interactive, user-friendly, time-based map.

Disaggregated data on age and sex for the first 250 days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bucharest, Romania

“…1 , Table 1 and the corresponding main content) is sufficiently justified and detailed that future researchers could use this, to extract, or modify it for their own purpose of exploration. Also, the modelling of COVID-19 spreading in this micro-context may be performed by corroborating our dataset with the detailed evidence available with the COVID-19 Border Accountability Project (COBAP) 47 .…”

Did border closures slow SARS-CoV-2?

“…We are confident in our measurement strategy of treated and control units because their assignment was pre-defined by our project database’s criteria for inclusion, available in the initial publication of the data set. 3 The outcome variable—a reduction in SARS-CoV-2 cases—relies on the data collected by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). 20 To account for the fact that countries had uneven access to testing, we included testing in our model and measured the outcome as a proportion relative to population size.…”

“…This is the most comprehensive and precise record of border closures introduced in response to the pandemic, to our knowledge. Shiraef et al 3 reviewed comparable data sets in more depth in the initial release of the COBAP data set. For this study’s purpose, we converted the COBAP Team observational data into a time-series database of country-week units, which allows us to assess a sample size of more than 11,000 units.…”

“…We analyze the impact of these border closures on virus spread using the COVID Border Accountability Project (COBAP) database. 3 In May 2020, we formed the COBAP Team to document for researchers and the public a systematic database of these closures, hand-coded from government policy texts into systematized closure types ( https://covidborderaccountability.org ). We found more than 1000 entry restrictions introduced in 2020, marking a sudden and unprecedented halt to people’s access to travel and movement across international borders.…”

“… 45 For access to the entire COBAP data set, researchers can use our data descriptor. 3 Members of the public and policymakers can access the data and sources by clicking on a country in the interactive map on our project website ( https://covidborderaccountability.org ).…”