Poverty and Economic Dislocation Reduce Compliance with COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place Protocols

Abstract

Shelter-in-place policies reduce social contact and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Inconsistent compliance with social distancing creates local and regional interpersonal transmission risks. Using county-day measures on population movement derived from cellphone location data, we investigate whether compliance with local shelter-in-place ordinances varies across US counties with different economic endowments. Our theoretical model implies economic endowments will influence compliance with social distancing. We find evidence that low income areas do comply less than counties with stronger economic endowments. Findings suggest targeted economic relief could improve future compliance with public health interventions.

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

“…These characteristics include population density and residents' education, political orientation, and age. 3,4 Fixed effects for each day in each of the nine U.S. Census Divisions (522 fixed effects in total) allowed for flexible underlying trends in growth rates that could vary in different parts of the country, helping to account for the staggered nature of the outbreak across locations. 23 We report 95% confidence intervals, with standard errors robust to heteroskedasticity and clustered by state, the level of most of the policy variation.…”

“…1 Compliance with so-cial distancing orders appears to be related to local income, partisanship, and political beliefs in the US; and compliance with self-quarantines is related to potential losses in income in Israel. [2][3][4] Some epidemiological models forecast the eventual number of COVID-19 cases and fatalities based on untested assumptions about the impact of social distancing policies in contemporary society. The widely cited Imperial College model assumes contact outside the home, school or workplace declines by 75 percent, school contact rates are unchanged, workplace contact rates fall by 25 percent, and household contact rates rise by 25 percent.…”

Misinformation During a Pandemic

“…Related to our study is contemporaneous work studying correlations between political ideology and responses to the coronavirus. A number of studies find that areas with higher Republican vote shares practice less social distancing, as measured by cell phone GPS data (Allcott et al, 2020b; Barrios and Hochberg, 2020;Andersen, 2020;Wright et al, 2020). Allcott et al (2020b) additionally present survey evidence documenting substantial partisan differences in individual beliefs about personal risk and pandemic severity, while Barrios and Hochberg (2020) find that more Republican areas perceive lower risk, as measured by internet searches.…”

Homebound by COVID19: The Benefits and Consequences of Non-pharmaceutical Intervention Strategies

“…The COVID19 pandemic led to widespread school closure and shelter-in-place orders in the United States [30,31]. Despite the potential public health bene ts, there were many concerns about the economic impacts of shelter-in-place [10][11][12][13] and the disruptive effects of school closures on the education of children and youth [14,[21][22][23]32]. This study analyzed and compared several NPI scenarios, including combinations of school closure, voluntary quarantine, and shelter-in-place, with varying compliance levels and durations, as well as baseline scenarios of no intervention (Scenario 1) and school closure only (Scenario 2).…”