The effect of state-level social distancing policy stringency on mobility in the states of Brazil (original) (raw)
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Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 2021
Context: Reductions in population mobility can mitigate COVID-19 virus transmission and disease-related mortality. But do social distancing policies actually change population behavior and, if so, what factors condition policy effects? Methods: We leverage subnational variation in the stringency and timing of state-issued social distancing policies to test their effects on mobility across 109 states in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. We also explore how conventional predictors of compliance, including political trust, socioeconomic resources, health risks, and partisanship, modify these policy effects. Findings: In Brazil and the United States, stay-at-home orders and workplace closures reduced mobility, especially early in the pandemic. In Mexico, where federal intervention created greater policy uniformity, workplace closures produced the most consistent mobility reductions. Conventional explanations of compliance perform well in the United States but not in Brazil or Mexic...
By early April 2020, the U.S. experienced more confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths than any other country. Governments, businesses, and individuals have made extraordinary changes in how they function an effort to limit the spread of the virus. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary analysis of nearreal-time data related to policy responses, information shocks, and mobility patterns that serve as proxies for social distancing. We also examine population health outcomes that capture the magnitude and severity of the epidemic. We make two main contributions toward understanding the effects of policies related to the epidemic. First, we develop a typology to organize and group heterogeneous state and local government responses to the epidemic, and assess how those responses have affected social distancing measures in the early stages of the epidemic. Although social distancing has emerged as a major policy goal, very little is known about which policy approaches are effective at producing social distance, or about the importance of social changes relative to nationwide awareness of the epidemic or to state and local information on the progression of the epidemic. We harness several sources of commercial "smart-device" data on mobility and illness patterns and estimate event study regressions to examine the responsiveness of mobility patterns to various mitigation strategies. Second, we use data on confirmed COVID-19 cases and mortality to assess the degree to which governments' adoption of policies appear to correlate with anticipated growth in the epidemic at a local level. We estimate simple event study models of COVID-19 cases and deaths, and we also discuss some ways that difference in difference and event study models may be interpreted through the lens of a simple Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) theoretical model. Using multiple proxy outcome measures, we find large declines in mobility in all states since the start of the epidemic. Even states that did not implement major policy changes have experienced large mobility declines, and other states experienced large changes before the policy actions. This suggests that a substantial portion of the response to epidemic was not induced by specific government policies. However, our event study analysis implies that policy changes and informational events have also led to independent decreases in mobility. We find that five days after a state or county policy change or informational event, there are mobility reductions of between 1% to 18%, although most are in the 1% to 6% range. Our analysis of COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that state government action often immediately precedes substantial increases in caseloads and deaths. This is logical given efforts to model the direction of the epidemic, but it suggests methodological challenges in estimating the effects of policy changes on the COVID-19 related health outcomes. Overall, our results suggest that state and local government policy and informational events induced changes in mobility on top of what appears to be a much larger response across all states to the prevailing knowledge and events at both national and international levels. These patterns of response to local policies may, however, shed some light on the likely consequences of proposals to lift various government mandates and about the possible consequences of waning public support for social distancing, which could lead to a decline in the amount of voluntary reductions in mobility.
2020
Social distancing measures have been widely adopted to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about the timing of measures' implementation, scope, and duration in relation to their impact. The study aimed to describe the social distancing measures implemented by Brazil's states and the Federal District, including the types of measures and the timing of their implementation. This is a descriptive study of the measures' type, chronological and epidemiological timing of the implementation, and scope. The survey of measures used searches in official websites of the government departments and each state's Government Register. The official number of COVID-19 cases and deaths were obtained from an official a data platform. We considered the following categories of social distancing measures: suspension of events, school closure, quarantine of risk groups, economic lockdown (partial or full), restrictions on transportation, and quarantine of the population....
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
Social distancing is a powerful non-pharmaceutical intervention used as a way to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus around the world since the end of 2019 in China. Taking that into account, this work aimed to identify variations on population mobility in South America during the pandemic (15 February to 27 October 2020). We used a data-driven approach to create a community mobility index from the Google Covid-19 Community Mobility and relate it to the Covid stringency index from Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT). Two hypotheses were established: countries which have adopted stricter social distancing measures have also a lower level of circulation (H1), and mobility is occurring randomly in space (H2). Considering a transient period, a low capacity of governments to respond to the pandemic with more stringent measures of social distancing was observed at the beginning of the crisis. In turn, considering a steady-state period, the results showed an inverse re...
A snapshot of a pandemic: The interplay between social isolation and COVID-19 dynamics in Brazil
Patterns, 2021
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most governments around the world implemented some kind of social distancing policy in an attempt to block the spreading of the virus within a territory. In Brazil, this mitigation strategy was first implemented in March 2020 and mainly monitored by social isolation indicators built from mobile geolocation data. While it is well known that social isolation has been playing a crucial role in epidemic control, the precise connections between mobility data indicators and epidemic dynamic parameters have a complex interdependence. In this work, we investigate this dependence for several Brazilian cities, looking also at socioeconomic and demographic factors that influence it. As expected, the increase in the social isolation indicator was shown to be related to the decrease in the speed of transmission of the disease, but the relation was shown to depend on the urban hierarchy level of the city, the human development index and also the epidemic curve stage. Moreover, a high social isolation at the beginning of the epidemic relates to a strong positive impact on flattening the epidemic curve, while less efficacy of this mitigation strategy was observed when it has been implemented later. Mobility data plays an important role in epidemiological modeling and decision-making, however, we discuss in this work how a direct relationship between social isolation data and COVID-19 data is hard to be established. Understanding this interplay is a key factor to better modeling, for which we hope this study contributes. Keywords Human mobility • Mobile geolocation • Urban hierarchy • Spatial-temporal patterns • Temporal series • COVID-19 1 Introduction The importance of human mobility during the COVID-19 outbreak has been clear since the beginning of the epidemic, in Wuhan, China in late December 2019, from where it spread throughout the highly connected network of tourism and business cities in the world, becoming a pandemic on March 11, 2020. It is not the first disease that used this pathway to move, since SARS and H1N1, for example, have also used it, but is certainly the most efficient one to do so in the last century. Since it is transmitted mainly through contaminated droplets of naso-oropharyngeal secretions from infected individuals, the rate of infections by the SARS-Cov-2 is related to human mobility in general, but more specifically to the close contacts between individuals of a population 23 .
State variation in effects of state social distancing policies on COVID-19 cases
BMC Public Health
Background The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) sickened over 20 million residents in the United States (US) by January 2021. Our objective was to describe state variation in the effect of initial social distancing policies and non-essential business (NEB) closure on infection rates early in 2020. Methods We used an interrupted time series study design to estimate the total effect of all state social distancing orders, including NEB closure, shelter-in-place, and stay-at-home orders, on cumulative COVID-19 cases for each state. Data included the daily number of COVID-19 cases and deaths for all 50 states and Washington, DC from the New York Times database (January 21 to May 7, 2020). We predicted cumulative daily cases and deaths using a generalized linear model with a negative binomial distribution and a log link for two models. Results Social distancing was associated with a 15.4% daily reduction (Relative Risk = 0.846; Confidence Interval [CI] = 0.832, 0.859) in COVID-19...
Are Mobility and COVID-19 Related? A Dynamic Analysis for Portuguese Districts
Entropy
In this research work, we propose to assess the dynamic correlation between different mobility indices, measured on a daily basis, and the new cases of COVID-19 in the different Portuguese districts. The analysis is based on global correlation measures, which capture linear and non-linear relationships in time series, in a robust and dynamic way, in a period without significant changes of non-pharmacological measures. The results show that mobility in retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, and public transport shows a higher correlation with new COVID-19 cases than mobility in parks, workplaces or residences. It should also be noted that this relationship is lower in districts with lower population density, which leads to the need for differentiated confinement policies in order to minimize the impacts of a terrible economic and social crisis.
The Effects of Social Distancing Measures on COVID-19 Spreads in European Countries
Review of Economic Perspectives
This study investigates the effects of social distancing measures on various types of social mobility, using country- and day-fixed effects on a panel of daily data comprising 29 European countries. Although social distancing measures proved to be significant for all types of mobility in the examined period, they are best captured by retail and recreation mobility. Linear effects of restrictive measures on COVID-19 cases and deaths are examined by OLS regression with country- and day-fixed effects on a panel of 29 European countries, while non-linear effects were investigated by quantile regressions. Stricter mobility restrictions significantly reduced COVID-19 cases and deaths, but the variant of the virus was also an important determinant. Although the Delta variant was much more infectious, its mortality reduced. However, the impact of social distancing measures on COVID-19 cases and deaths was not constant but strengthened with increasing quantiles of the distribution of cases a...
Spreading of COVID-19 in Brazil: Impacts and uncertainties in social distancing strategies
2020
Brazil’s continental dimension poses a challenge to the control of the spread of COVID-19. Due to the country specific scenario of high social and demographic heterogeneity, combined with limited testing capacity, lack of reliable data, under-reporting of cases, and restricted testing policy, the focus of this study is twofold: (i) to develop a generalized SEIRD model that implicitly takes into account the quarantine measures, and (ii) to estimate the response of the COVID-19 spread dynamics to perturbations/uncertainties. By investigating the projections of cumulative numbers of confirmed and death cases, as well as the effective reproduction number, we show that the model parameter related to social distancing measures is one of the most influential along all stages of the disease spread and the most influential after the infection peak. Due to such importance in the outcomes, different relaxation strategies of social distancing measures are investigated in order to determine whic...
Revista Latinoamericana de Opinión Pública
Non-pharmaceutical interventions to increase physical distancing have been instrumental in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Governments have enacted stringent public health policies that impose limits on mobility outside the household. However, for containment policies to be effective, there is a growing understanding that emergency aid programs must be designed to ensure that the most vulnerable receive financial and in-kind aid resources to support their ability to “stay at home.” In this study, we use survey data from an Oxford USP-FGV collaborative research initiative to empirically assess the effectiveness of these two policies in reducing mobility with an eye to those at-risk or living in conditions of poverty in eight Brazilian capitals. We learn that, in general, neither stringent public health policies and receipt nor promised receipt of the Auxílio Emergencial were effective in limiting mobility outside of the home. We do, however, find limited evidence that receipt or ...