Social Distancing Causally Impacts the Spread of SARS-CoV-2: A U.S. Nationwide Event Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We assess the causal impact of a spontaneous relaxation of social distancing practices on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S., while controlling for social mobility and state-imposed social distancing restrictions. Using the quasi-experimental setting created by the U.S. nationwide protests precipitated by George Floyd’s tragic death on May 25, 2020, we document a country-wide increase of over 3·06 cases per day, per 100,000 population, following the onset of the protests (95% CI:2·47–3·65), and a further in-crease of 1·73 cases per day, per 100,000 population, in the counties in which the protests took place (95% CI:0·59–2·87). Relative to the week preceding the onset of the protests, this represents a 61·2% country-wide increase in COVID-19 cases, and a further 34·6% increase in the protest counties. Hence, we conclude that social distancing practices causally impact the spread of SARS-CoV-2. The observed effect cannot be explained by changes in social distancing restrictions and social mobility, and our placebo tests rule out the possibility that this finding is attributable to chance. Our research informs policy makers and provides insights regarding the usefulness of social distancing as an intervention to minimize the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".