New Metrics for Assessing the State Performance in Combating the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Abstract

 A hierarchical linear model was established to associate the infection rate with the collected explicit factors, which were demonstrated to greatly influence the spreading of COVID-19 in previous studies, and the unobserved heterogeneity was also incorporated to better reflect the hierarchical structure. Two model-based metrics were proposed for assessing the state performance by adjusting the measurable county-level covariates and the unobservable state-specific variation. These metrics can give insight into certain aspects of a state's performance in combating the COVID-19 pandemic in addition to the widely used crude infection rate.