May 22, 2023

The health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting every sector of the U.S. economy from families to businesses large and small and to government at all levels, including education from Pre-K thru higher ed. The economic dislocation from the crisis began when state and local governments imposed social distancing measures in March and April 2020 to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus disease. These measures included bans on large social gatherings; school closures; closures of entertainment venues, gyms, bars, and restaurant dining areas; and shelter-in-place orders. A first-order question is whether these measures limited the spread of the virus, and thus mitigated potentially tragic long-term health and economic consequences of the pandemic.

In a paper published in Health Affairs, Chuck Courtemanche and Aaron Yelowitz, along with UK graduate student Ahn Le and University of Louisville faculty Joseph Garuccio and Joshua Pinkston, evaluated the impact of these social distancing measures on the growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases across US counties between March 1, 2020, and April 27, 2020.

An event study design allowed each policy’s impact on COVID-19 case growth to evolve over time. They found that adoption of government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the daily growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases by 5.4 percentage points after one to five days, 6.8 percentage points after six to ten days, 8.2 percentage points after eleven to fifteen days, and 9.1 percentage points after sixteen to twenty days.

Holding the amount of voluntary social distancing constant, these results imply that there would have been ten times greater spread of COVID-19 by April 27 without shelter-in-place orders (ten million cases) and more than thirty-five times greater spread without any of the four measures (thirty-five million cases). Their article illustrates the potential danger of exponential spread in the absence of interventions, providing information relevant to strategies for restarting economic activity.