Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19

Abstract

Social distancing is the core policy response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). But, as federal, state and local governments begin opening businesses and relaxing shelter-in-place orders worldwide, we lack quantitative evidence on how policies in one region affect mobility and social distancing in other regions and the consequences of uncoordinated regional policies adopted in the presence of such spillovers. To investigate this concern, we combined daily, county-level data on shelter-in-place policies with movement data from over 27 million mobile devices, social network connections among over 220 million Facebook users, daily temperature and precipitation data from 62,000 weather stations, and county-level census data on population demographics to estimate the geographic and social network spillovers created by regional policies across the United States. Our analysis shows that the contact patterns of people in a given region are significantly influenced by the policies and behaviors of people in other, sometimes distant, regions. When just one-third of a state’s social and geographic peer states adopt shelter-in-place policies, it creates a reduction in mobility equal to the state’s own policy decisions. These spillovers are mediated by peer travel and distancing behaviors in those states. A simple analytical model calibrated with our empirical estimates demonstrated that the “loss from anarchy” in uncoordinated state policies is increasing in the number of noncooperating states and the size of social and geographic spillovers. These results suggest a substantial cost of uncoordinated government responses to COVID-19 when people, ideas, and media move across borders.

Social Networks Shape Beliefs and Behavior: Evidence from Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Related studies have investigated the role of political affiliation (Allcott et al, 2020b;. Not only are a state's own policies an important determinant of social distancing (Allcott et al, 2020a), but there are also important spillover effects across places (Holtz et al, 2020). Our results build on these prior works, using large-scale individual level data to provide new insights into the determinants of health behaviors during a pandemic.…”

Multiscale dynamic human mobility flow dataset in the U.S. during the COVID-19 epidemic

“…Although companies such as Descartes Labs ( https://www.descarteslabs.com/mobility/ ) 39 , Apple ( https://covid19.apple.com/mobility ), Google ( https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/ ) 40 , and Facebook ( https://dataforgood.fb.com/docs/covid19/ ) 41 , have released a set of near real-time mobility-related open datasets for monitoring human mobility changes and social distancing behaviour during the COVID-19 period, these datasets are lacking in three respects. First, human mobility flow matrices, which describe movement patterns from origin geographic units to destination regions, are often unavailable, even though such O-D paired flow matrices are incredibly valuable for epidemic transmission modeling and spatial-social interaction measurements 2 , 10 , 19 , 42 , 43 . For instance, only aggregated mobility indices (such as median travel distance and foot-traffic) at a specific region is provided by the Descartes Labs, Apple, and Google mobility datasets.…”

What Protective Health Measures Are Americans Taking in Response to COVID-19? Results from the COVID Impact Survey

“…In March, the president and all 50 governors declared a state of emergency [ 21 ], which is defined as any event for which the president deems it necessary to provide additional federal assistance to protect property and/or public health and safety in an effort to lessen or avert catastrophe [ 22 ]. Although the U.S. developed pandemic plans in response to the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the growing avian influenza threat, preparedness for and response to viral disasters [ 23 ] varies greatly from country to country and even state to state [ 24 , 25 ] here in the U.S. As of 1 April 2020, 33 states had issued statewide stay-at-home orders and 13 states had issued partial stay-at-home orders [ 26 ]. The pandemic disaster response has taken the form of voluntary international, national, and local guidelines and some involuntary policies, regulations, and orders (e.g., wearing facemasks, working from home, and closing of non-essential businesses) [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ].…”