Abstract
Abstract What is the effect of social distancing policies on the spread of the new coronavirus? Social distancing policies rose to prominence as most capable of containing contagion and saving lives. Our purpose in this paper is to identify the causal effect of social distancing policies on the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and on contagion velocity. We align our main argument with the existing scientific consensus: social distancing policies negatively affect the number of cases. To test this hypothesis, we construct a dataset with daily information on 78 affected countries in the world. We compute several relevant measures from publicly available information on the number of cases and deaths to estimate causal effects for short-term and cumulative effects of social distancing policies. We use a time-series cross-sectional matching approach to match countries’ observable histories. Causal effects (ATTs and ATEs) can be extracted via a dif-in-dif estimator. Results show that social distancing policies reduce the aggregated number of cases by 4,832 on average (or 17.5/100 thousand), but only when strict measures are adopted. This effect seems to manifest from the third week onwards.
Highlights
On the 30th of January 2020, the Italian Government confirmed its first two imported cases of the novel coronavirus: two Chinese tourists1
Compared to other European countries, Italy became a severe case of the coronavirus pandemic
Some attributed this to the perceived slowness of Italian national and local governments’ responses, both in quickly identifying the disease and in taking swift action to implement prescribed policies, such as closing businesses and locking down cities (Pisano, Sadun & Zanini, 2020), with the emphasis being given to strict social distancing policies
Summary
On the 30th of January 2020, the Italian Government confirmed its first two imported cases of the novel coronavirus: two Chinese tourists. Compared to other European countries, Italy became a severe case of the coronavirus pandemic Some attributed this to the perceived slowness of Italian national and local governments’ responses, both in quickly identifying the disease and in taking swift action to implement prescribed policies, such as closing businesses and locking down cities (Pisano, Sadun & Zanini, 2020), with the emphasis being given to strict social distancing policies. Our results indicate social distancing policies reduce the aggregated number of contaminated people by 4832 on average or 17.5 people per 100 thousand inhabitants This effect is larger than the average of contaminated cases (per 100k) of all countries (15.62) and seems to manifest from the third week onwards. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: (1) a brief overview of the coronavirus pandemic contagion, (2) exposition of the main argument, (3) data and methods, (4) results and discussion
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