Strong Social Distancing Measures In The United States Reduced The COVID-19 Growth Rate.

By Charles Courtemanche, Joseph Garuccio, A. Le, Joshua C. Pinkston, Aaron Yelowitz. Health Affairs, 2020

776 citations recorded by the source corpus.

State and local governments imposed social distancing measures in March and April of 2020 to contain the spread of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). These included large event bans, school closures, closures of entertainment venues, gyms, bars, and restaurant dining areas, and shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs). We evaluated the impact of these measures on the growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases across US counties between March 1, 2020 and April 27, 2020. An event-study design allowed each policy's impact on COVID-19 case growth to evolve over time. Adoption of government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the daily growth rate by 5.4 percentage points after 1-5 days, 6.8 after 6-10 days, 8.2 after 11-15 days, and 9.1 after 16-20 days. Holding the amount of voluntary social distancing constant, these results imply 10 times greater spread by April 27 without SIPOs (10 million cases) and more than 35 times greater spread without any of the four measures (35 million). Our paper illustrates the potential danger of exponential spread in the absence of interventions, providing relevant information to strategies for restarting economic activity. [Editor's Note: This Fast Track Ahead Of Print article is the accepted version of the peer-reviewed manuscript. The final edited version will appear in an upcoming issue of Health Affairs.].

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/720cab0cc2352ac6fc1a06eb087000bb7aa94ede

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Citations in the corpus

The political economy of the COVID‐19 pandemic (2021, background): “Courtemanche et al. (2020) empirically estimated that stay-at-home orders and bar and restaurant closures in March and April of 2020 did reduce transmission, although bans on large events and school closures did not.”
Effects of social distancing policy on labor market outcomes (2020, neutral): “Although studies have quantified the public health gains from social distancing policies (Courtemanche et al., 2020; Friedson et al., 2020), this paper is the first to assess whether the nature of labor market adjustments are consistent with the economic incentives present in US social benefits…”