Drivers of COVID-19 stay at home orders: Epidemiologic, economic, or political concerns?
What factors affected whether or not a U.S. state governor issued a state-wide stay-at-home order in response to the COVID-19 pandemic of early 2020? Once issued, what factors affected the length of this stay-at-home order? Using duration analysis, we test a number of epidemiological, economic, and political factors for their impact on a state governor’s decision to ultimately issue, and then terminate, blanket stay-at-home orders across the 50 U.S. states.
Results indicate that while epidemiologic and economic variables had some impact on the delay to initiation and length of the stay-at-home orders, political factors dominated both the initiation and ultimate duration of stay-at-home orders across the United States.
While previous studies found that ideology dominates in policy decision making related to pandemics, the authors find a more nuanced result that ideology can certainly dominate (and in this case, it did by size and consistency of significance of a governor’s party affiliation, in particular), but that scientific and economic factors may find their way into these policy decisions related to initiation and lifting of stay-at-home orders as well.