The Impact of Differing COVID-19 Mitigation Policies: Three Natural Experiments (preprint)

This paper presents a comparison of the COVID-19 infections between a select pair of neighboring states and their border county regions where the policies of the Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) such as Lockdown/Stay-at-Home differ. These analyses use a Difference-in-Differences (Diff-in Diff) model to test the effectiveness of NPI in mitigating COVID-19 infections at the state and border county regions between these states. The counties are in the states on the Iowa and Illinois border, the Dakotas (North and South) and Minnesota border and the Arkansas and Mississippi border. In each case the policies on each side of the border differ and the border is clearly designated by a river separation. Based on the Diff-in-Diff model output, state policies appear to make a significant difference in some of these specific border regions, at least early in the pandemic (April-June 2020). State level results are mixed reflecting spatial heterogeneity across the inter-state system.

Determinants of Voluntary Compliance: COVID-19 Mitigation (preprint)

During the pre-vaccine period, the success of containing the spread of COVID-19 depends upon how communities respond to non-pharmaceutical mitigation policies such as social distancing, wearing of masks, retail and dining constraints, crowd limitation, and shelter-in-place orders. Of these policies, shelter-in-place and social distancing are of central importance. By using county-level mobility data as a measure of a community’s voluntary compliance with social distancing policies, this study found that counties who received strong state social distancing policy directives and who had a high pro-social character showed lower mobility (better social distancing) after states reopened from shelter-in-place orders. Counties that experienced a longer duration of shelter-in-place orders showed higher mobility (less social distancing), implying that the duration of the shelter-in-place order deteriorated social distancing response after reopening. This may be because reopening sent a “safe” signal to these counties or resulted in a response to the pent-up demand inducing higher mobility. The results indicate that implementing shelter-in-place and social distancing policies to slow down the transmission of COVID-19 were not necessarily effective in motivating a county to reduce mobility voluntarily. A county’s pro-social character and the duration of shelter-in-place order should be considered when designing COVID-19 mitigation policies.

Regional Poverty Worsens Infectious Diseases: Evidence from COVID-19 Pandemic (preprint)

This paper examines the role of regional poverty on the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.A. It also verifies if the effects differ with the concentration of ethnic minorities. We find that poverty is a significant and consistent determinant of higher COVID-19 infections and fatalities. The prevalent poverty areas experienced higher infections due to its economic structures that require hypermobility - more physical human-to-human contacts and experienced higher deaths due to limited access to health services. These are also regions where minority groups are concentrated, and thus, the disproportionate infections and fatalities occurred within the black, Hispanic, and Asian population. Our evidence is robust to state fixed effects that capture local COVID-19 mitigation policies, multi-level hierarchical modeling, and large sets of county-level health, social, and economic factors. This paper contributes to the literature on health and economic disparities and their resulting consequences for infectious diseases.

June 20/20 Interim Report: H-K COVID-19 Study (preprint)

The prospect of co-occurrence of Influenza (Seasonal Flu) and COVID-19 is potentially a worrisome future development that could get worse if infections are co-located. In other words, if they share both time and space and where mitigating the dual threats might be difficult and poses new challenges. In this part of the interim report we do a exploratory analyses of discovering spatial overlaps between seasonal flu/pneumonia deaths reported by CDC and COVID-19 infections for all the counties in the Contiguous U.S. Also where such data is available we are exploring whether there is an overlap between 2019-2020 Seasonal Flu cases and the COVID-19 cases. The preliminary results are pointing to a very interesting finding: that there is almost no spatial overlap between either the FLI (Flu like Infection) deaths and COVID-19 OR FLI cases and COVID-19 cases.The preliminary results are presented in a series of maps and charts.This very interesting finding of near "null" spatial overlap between the two will be revisited and a detailed spatio-temporal analyses will be presented over he next few weeks.