The effect of state-level social distancing policy stringency on mobility in the states of Brazil

Abstract

In Brazil, sub-national governments have played a particularly important role as the key actors implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions to halt the spread of COVID-19. Building on the methodology proposed by the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), we coded the stringency levels of state-level school, commerce, services, industry, public gathering, and private event closure policies and describe these actions’ duration at the state-level in Brazil from early February to mid-May 2020. Our results suggest significant heterogeneity across Brazil and across weeks in social distancing policy stringency during this period. We then apply dynamic times-series cross-sectional methods to evaluate the effect of anti-contagion policies on the population’s mobility using cell phone location data. We find that anti-contagion policies had a significant effect on producing higher adherence to remaining at home even though social distancing policies were relatively moderate as compared to other countries. Our results also suggest that social distancing policies have a greater impact when a more complete and coherent set of policies were introduced and sustained by state governments.

A control framework to optimize public health policies in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The SMRI baseline is defined as the minimum level for the control strategy, and it is calculated from the first disclosed data, available in InLoco dataset 29 , and 28 days before the pandemic starts. Supplementary investigations regarding the effect of social distancing policies in Brazil can be found in the work of Barberia et al 30 . In what followed, six characteristic temporal states were identified: (1) March 6-15: community transmission had been declared in the state, but no governmental measure had been established (stringency ; average SMRI ; (2) March 16–20: initial measures were set in place ( ; average SMRI ); (3) March 21-May 10: this period corresponded to the peak population compliance to distancing recommendations ( ; average SMRI ); (4) May 11-June 15 and June 25-August 20: u reached its maximum value of 49.2% (representing the peak of interventions) with average SMRI of and , respectively; (5) June 6–23: population compliance started to decrease with the concurrent reduction in stringency ( ; average SMRI ); and (6) August 21-September 15: following the peak number of cases, a progressive decrease of both stringency and compliance ensued ( ; average SMRI ).…”

The auxílio emergencial and stringent social distancing policies in Brazil: the impact on mobility and non-work travel outside the home

“…Scholars, policymakers, and others have directed efforts to identify whether and the extent to which these social distancing policies reduced population mobility. In alignment with research in other regions of the world (Hsiang et al, 2020), country-specific studies for Latin America generally discerned that higher levels of stringency in social distancing policies were more effective in reducing population mobility (for the Brazilian case, see Barberia et al, 2021) and COVID-19 cases (for the case of Chile, see Bennett 2021).…”

Should I stay or should I go? Embracing causal heterogeneity in the study of pandemic policy and citizen behavior

“…The examples of countries such as China and New Zealand that were able to reach a low level of cases after imposing strict lockdowns were rare. Instead, in countries such as in the United States and Brazil, governments lifted social distancing policies quickly or never activated them nationwide (Adolph et al., 2021; Barberia et al., 2021). Intermittent (“on,” “off”, “on” again) social distancing policies, were increasingly recognized to be politically easier to implement and enforce, though also recognized to impose larger overall economic or health‐care costs as these policies only shifted the infection peak into the future (Rachel, 2020).…”