Social distancing merely stabilized COVID‐19 in the United States
Abstract
Social distancing measures have been imposed across the United States in order to stem the spread of COVID‐19. We quantify the reduction in the doubling rate, by state, that is associated with this intervention. Using the earlier of K‐12 school closures and restaurant closures, by state, to define the start of the intervention, and considering daily confirmed cases through April 23, 2020, we find that social distancing is associated with a statistically‐significant (p ) reduction in the doubling rate for all states except for Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when controlling for false discovery, with the doubling rate averaged across the states falling from 0.302 (0.285, 0.320) days−1 to 0.010 (−0.007, 0.028) days−1. However, we do not find that social distancing has made the spread subcritical. Instead, social distancing has merely stabilized the spread of the disease. We provide an illustration of our findings for each state, including estimates of the effective reproduction number, R, both with and without social distancing. We also discuss the policy implications of our findings.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2020
- Source ID
- 10.1002/sta4.302
Entities
People
- Aaron B. Wagner
- Ajay Anand
- David S. Matteson
- Dongmei Li
- Elaine L Hill
- Grace Deng
- Jayadev Acharya
- Peter Wu
- Sean Ryan
- Sourbh Bhadane
- Victor Hernandez Martinez
- Ziteng Sun
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- Cornell University
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
- National Institutes of Health
- National Science Foundation
- United States Agency for International Development
- University of Lancaster
- University of Rochester