Abstract
Social distancing has manifold effects and is used as a non-pharmacological measure to respond to pandemic situations such as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), especially in the absence of vaccines and other useful antiviral drugs. Governments around the globe have adopted and implemented a series of social distancing strategies. The efficacy of various policies and their comparative influence on mechanisms led by public actions and adoptions have not been examined. The differences in types and effective dates of various social distancing policies in various provinces/territories of Pakistan constitute a pure ground to examine the causal effects of each COVID-19 policy. Using the location trends and population movement data released by Google, a quasi-experimental method was used to measure the impact of the government’s various social distancing policies on the people’s existence at home and their outside social mobility. Based on the magnitude and importance of policy influences, this research ranked six social distancing policies whose influence exceeded the effect of voluntary behavior. Our research outcomes describe that the trend of staying at home was firmly pushed by state-wide home order rather than necessary business closings and policies that were associated with public gathering restrictions. Strong government policies have a strong causal effect on reducing social interactions.
Highlights
Published: 21 January 2021The ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by infection with acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
This study’s primary concern was to focus on how COVID-19 prevention policies sented above on the daily visits at several places in different provinces/territories of Pakirestricted people to stay at home, shown in column two of Table 1
This study’s primary concern was to focus on how COVID-19 prevention policies province/territory-wise lockdown and a ban on transportation orders significantly rerestricted people to stay at home, shown in column two of Table 1
Summary
The ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is caused by infection with acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). On 31 December 2019, a novel coronavirus outbreak occurred in Wuhan, Hubei, China [1] and was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020. The increase in infection index has affected all WHO regions [2]. The core of a contagious infection is its infectiousness—that it could be transmitted both directly and indirectly from one person to more [4]. If one person with this disease cannot transmit it to multiple people, it would gradually disappear [5]. Governments worldwide are threatened with extinction by COVID-19 and are compelled to adopt specific steps to prevent the spread of disease [6,7]
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