Evaluating the policy of closing bars and restaurants in Cataluña and its effects on mobility and COVID19 incidence

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Abstract

The world has gone through unprecedented changes since the global pandemic hit. During the early phase of the pandemic, the absence of known drugs or pharmaceutical treatments forced governments to introduce different policies in order to help reduce contagion rates and manage the economic consequences of the pandemic. This paper analyses the causal impact on mobility and COVID19 incidence from policy makers in Cataluña, Spain. We use anonymized phone-based mobility data together with reported incidence and apply a series of causal impact models frequently used in econometrics and policy evaluation in order to measure the policies impact. We analyse the case of Cataluña and the public policy decision of closing all bars and restaurants down for a 5 week period between 2020-16-10 and 2020-23-11. We find that this decision led to a significant reduction in mobility. It not only led to reductions in mobility but from a behavioural economics standpoint, we highlight how people responded to the policy decision. Moreover, the policy of closing bars and restaurants slowed the incidence rate of COVID19 after a time lag has been taken into account. These findings are significant since governments worldwide want to restrict movements of people in order to slow down COVID19 incidence without infringing on their rights directly.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2021.12.03.21267172: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.


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