Stay-at-home orders associate with subsequent decreases in COVID-19 cases and fatalities in the United States

Governments issue "stay-at-home" orders to reduce the spread of contagious diseases, but the magnitude of such orders' effectiveness remains uncertain. In the United States these orders were not coordinated at the national level during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2021-06, Vol.16 (6), p.e0248849-e0248849
Main Authors: Fowler, James H, Hill, Seth J, Levin, Remy, Obradovich, Nick
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Calendars
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Disease control
Disease transmission
Earth Sciences
Evaluation
Fatalities
Intervention
Medicine and Health Sciences
Mitigation
Pandemics
People and places
Political science
Politics
Prevention
Public health
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
Shelter in place
Social Sciences
Software
Temporal variations
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Summary:Governments issue "stay-at-home" orders to reduce the spread of contagious diseases, but the magnitude of such orders' effectiveness remains uncertain. In the United States these orders were not coordinated at the national level during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which creates an opportunity to use spatial and temporal variation to measure the policies' effect. Here, we combine data on the timing of stay-at-home orders with daily confirmed COVID-19 cases and fatalities at the county level during the first seven weeks of the outbreak in the United States. We estimate the association between stay-at-home orders and alterations in COVID-19 cases and fatalities using a difference-in-differences design that accounts for unmeasured local variation in factors like health systems and demographics and for unmeasured temporal variation in factors like national mitigation actions and access to tests. Compared to counties that did not implement stay-at-home orders, the results show that the orders are associated with a 30.2 percent (11.0 to 45.2) average reduction in weekly incident cases after one week, a 40.0 percent (23.4 to 53.0) reduction after two weeks, and a 48.6 percent (31.1 to 61.7) reduction after three weeks. Stay-at-home orders are also associated with a 59.8 percent (18.3 to 80.2) average reduction in weekly fatalities after three weeks. These results suggest that stay-at-home orders might have reduced confirmed cases by 390,000 (170,000 to 680,000) and fatalities by 41,000 (27,000 to 59,000) within the first three weeks in localities that implemented stay-at-home orders.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0248849