Pandemic Politics: Timing State-Level Social Distancing Responses to COVID-19

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Abstract

Context: Social distancing is an essential but economically painful measure to flatten the curve of emergent infectious diseases. As the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spread throughout the United States in early 2020, the federal government left to the states the difficult and consequential decisions about when to cancel events, close schools and businesses, and issue stay-at-home orders.

Methods: The authors present an original, detailed dataset of state-level social distancing policy responses to the epidemic; they then apply event history analysis to study the timing of implementation of five social distancing policies across all 50 states.

Results: The most important predictor of when states adopted social distancing policies is political: all else equal, states led by Republican governors were slower to implement such policies during a critical window of early COVID-19 response.

Conclusions: Continuing actions driven by partisanship rather than by public health expertise and scientific recommendations may exact greater tolls on health and broader society.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.30.20046326: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    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.

    About SciScore

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