Compliance with the first UK covid-19 lockdown and the compounding effects of weather

Abstract

The effectiveness of containment measures has been shown to depend on both epidemiological and sociological mechanisms, most notably compliance with national lockdown rules. Yet, there has been growing discontent with social distancing rules during national lockdowns across several countries, particularly among certain demographic and socio-economic groups. Using a highly granular dataset on compliance of over 105,000 individuals between March and May 2020 in the United Kingdom (UK), we find that compliance with lockdown policies was initially high in the overall population during the earlier phase of the pandemic, but that compliance fell substantially over time, especially among specific segments of society. Warmer temperatures increased the non-compliance of individuals who are male, divorced, part-time employed, and/or parent of more than two children. Thus, while epidemiologically the virus spread was naturally more limited during the warmer period of 2020, sociologically the higher temperature led to lower individual-level compliance with public health measures. As long as new strains emerge, governments may therefore be required to complement vaccination campaigns with targeted and time limited restrictions. Since non-complying individuals at the beginning of the pandemic share certain characteristics with vaccination sceptics, understanding their compliance behaviour will remain essential for future policymaking.

A Global Analysis of the Effectiveness of Policy Responses to COVID-19

“…The year of 2020 ended with a compliance level of 37.45%. This aligns well with the findings of Ganslmeier et al (2022), where compliance is shown to be modulated both by weather and social patterns; compliance dips in the typically hotter months and known periods of socialisation.…”

“…The factors influencing compliance are many and of course vary from one person to the next. For example, Ganslmeier et al (2022), in a UK study, highlighted increased symptoms of fatigue based among males, the divorced, part-time employees, and/or parents of more than two children during periods of warmer temperature. By considering a number of variables, we can, however, offer some insights about how populations respond in aggregate.…”

Partisanship and Covid-19 vaccination in the UK

“…The second similarity relates to the extent of partisan polarization in the US, which has also been widely documented in the UK 11,25 . Debates have focused on whether distinct voter groups have systematically different attitudes, behaviours, and policy priorities, and if so, what can explain these differences 26 . Partisan ideology has notably been argued to shape how people respond to scientific facts 27 .…”

Quantifying and Realizing the Benefits of Targeting for Pandemic Response

“…8 The right panel suggests that ROLD COMP(p) Pareto-dominates ROLD ACT even for small compliance levels when restricting to moderate values of χ, and Pareto-dominates over all tested χ's for sufficiently large levels of compliance. We also consider a variation of limited compliance in which we allow each age group to have a group-specific compliance fraction calibrated from empirical data (Ganslmeier et al 2022) and the resuls are very similar (Appendix EC.8.4).…”

“…For CURFEW, the proposed calculation just replaces a g (t) in these equations with a,eff g The performance of limited compliance policies with age-group-specific compliance, for different compliance levels. We estimate a relative scaling of compliance fractions across age groups using the estimates in Ganslmeier et al (2022). Keeping the relative scaling across age groups fixed, and denoting the compliance fraction for the least compliant age group by p, we look at the performance of ROLD COMP-NH(p) as p varies.…”