ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Measuring voluntary and policy-induced social distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 76 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
76 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The methodologies to assess the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID-19: a systematic review.European journal of epidemiology · 2022Pooled it
- The Effect of Voluntary Staying at Home on Japanese Female Suicide During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Health economics · 2026Article
- Start from the end: Policy exploration to inform effective and consistent interventions applied to COVID-19 in St. Louis.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Estimating the effect of self-protection on transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 in Germany in 2021: a modelling study.BMC public health · 2026Article
- The persistence of behavioral disparities post-pandemic: Insights from activity time series data.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Inferring mobility reductions from COVID-19 disease spread along the urban-rural gradient.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Inferring the timing of individual mobility decisions from accommodation reservation data during the COVID-19 outbreak.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The effect of COVID-19 vaccination on change in contact and implications for transmission.Epidemics · 2025Article
- Excess Respiratory Hospitalisations Associated with Influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus and SARS-CoV-2 in Singapore from 2015 to 2023.Influenza and other respiratory viruses · 2025Article
- Understanding Nash epidemics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Breastfeeding and workplace support in Nepal.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Adaptive behaviour during epidemics: a social risk appraisal approach to modelling dynamics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- "Early, rapid, aggressive": when strategic interactions between governments, opposition, and lobbies can hinder effective responses to epidemics.Frontiers in epidemiology · 2025Article
- Evaluating the direct effect of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe.Communications medicine · 2024Article
- Examining the effects of voluntary avoidance behaviour and policy-mediated behaviour change on the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2: A mathematical model.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2024Article
- Article
- SIR+ models: accounting for interaction-dependent disease susceptibility in the planning of public health interventions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Identifying waves of COVID-19 mortality using skew normal curves.Journal of applied statistics · 2024Article
16 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Staying home and avoiding unnecessary contact is an important part of the effort to contain COVID-19 and limit deaths. Every state in the United States enacted policies to encourage distancing and some mandated staying home. Understanding how these policies interact with individuals' voluntary responses to the COVID-19 epidemic is a critical initial step in understanding the role of these nonpharmaceutical interventions in transmission dynamics and assessing policy impacts. We use variation in policy responses along with smart device data that measures the amount of time Americans stayed home to disentangle the extent that observed shifts in staying home behavior are induced by policy. We find evidence that stay-at-home orders and voluntary response to locally reported COVID-19 cases and deaths led to behavioral change. For the median county, which implemented a stay-at-home order with about two cases, we find that the response to stay-at-home orders increased time at home as if the county had experienced 29 additional local cases. However, the relative effect of stay-at-home orders was much greater in select counties. On the one hand, the mandate can be viewed as displacing a voluntary response to this rise in cases. On the other hand, policy accelerated the response, which likely helped reduce spread in the early phase of the pandemic. It is important to be able to attribute the relative role of self-interested behavior or policy mandates to understand the limits and opportunities for relying on voluntary behavior as opposed to imposing stay-at-home orders.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.