Lockdown Strategies, Mobility Patterns and COVID-19

TL;DR

This study analyzes how different lockdown policies and mobility changes across 135 countries affected COVID-19 spread, highlighting the most effective interventions like banning public events and school closures.

Contribution

It introduces a multiple-events model that accounts for concurrent policies and quantifies their individual impacts on COVID-19 incidence and mobility patterns.

Findings

Cancelling public events and school closures significantly reduce COVID-19 cases.

Workplace and stay-at-home orders have moderate effects.

International travel controls and public transport restrictions show no significant impact.

Abstract

We develop a multiple-events model and exploit within and between country variation in the timing, type and level of intensity of various public policies to study their dynamic effects on the daily incidence of COVID-19 and on population mobility patterns across 135 countries. We remove concurrent policy bias by taking into account the contemporaneous presence of multiple interventions. The main result of the paper is that cancelling public events and imposing restrictions on private gatherings followed by school closures have quantitatively the most pronounced effects on reducing the daily incidence of COVID-19. They are followed by workplace as well as stay-at-home requirements, whose statistical significance and levels of effect are not as pronounced. Instead, we find no effects for international travel controls, public transport closures and restrictions on movements across cities and regions. We establish that these findings are mediated by their effect on population mobility patterns in a manner consistent with time-use and epidemiological factors.