Public Health Shock, Intervention Policies, and Health Behaviors: Evidence from COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries, including the U.S., adopted intervention policies aimed at averting the spread. However, these policies may have led to significant changes in public health behaviors. We use Google search queries to examine how state government actions are associated with people’s internet searches (internet browsing habits) related to health behaviors. We employ the differences-in-differences method to determine the link between disease outbreak, associated intervention policies, and changes in health behavior related searches. Our findings show that school closures, restaurant restrictions, and stay-at-home orders lead to a significant rise in searches for workout, physical activity, exercise, takeout, liquor, and wine. Moreover, people’s concerns regarding weight loss, diet, nutrition, restaurant, and fast food substantially decline following stay-at-home orders. Our event-study results indicate that changes in health behaviors began weeks before stay-at-home orders were implemented contemporaneously with emergency declarations and other partial closures. These findings suggest that people’s health behaviors are notably affected by state government’s intervention policies.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".