Impacts of State-Level Policies on Social Distancing in the United States Using Aggregated Mobility Data during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Gregory A. Wellenius, Swapnil Vispute, Valeria Espinosa, Alex Fabrikant, Thomas C. Tsai, Jonathan Hennessy, Brian Williams, Krishna Gadepalli, Adam Boulanger, Adam Pearce, Chaitanya Kamath, Arran Schlosberg, Catherine Bendebury, Charlotte Stanton, Shailesh Bavadekar, Christopher Pluntke, Damien Desfontaines, Benjamin H. Jacobson, Zan Armstrong, Bryant Gipson, Royce Wilson, Andrew Widdowson, Katherine Chou, Andrew Oplinger, Tomer Shekel, Ashish K. Jha, Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Abstract
Social distancing has emerged as the primary mitigation strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. However, large-scale evaluation of the public's response to social distancing campaigns has been lacking. We used anonymized and aggregated mobility data from Google Location History users to estimate the impact of social distancing recommendations on bulk mobility among users who have opted into this service. We found that state-of-emergency declarations resulted in approximately a 10% reduction in time spent away from places of residence. Implementation of one or more social distancing policies resulted in an additional 25% reduction in mobility the following week. Subsequent shelter-in-place mandates provided an additional 29% reduction. Our findings provide evidence that state-wide mandates are effective in promoting social distancing within this study group.