Local containment policies and countrywide spread of COVID-19 in the United States: an epidemiologic analysis
分析了美国早期新冠肺炎病例的空间扩散，发现新病例跨县传播，且邻州封锁政策影响传播；空间SIR模型显示，若限制较少的州收紧社交距离，其他州累计感染减少约5%。
We analyse the spatial diffusion of new COVID-19 cases and the countrywide impact of state-specific containment policies during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We first use spatial econometric techniques to document direct and indirect spillovers of new infections across county and state lines, as well as the impact of individual states’ lockdown policies on infections in neighbouring states. We find consistent statistical evidence that new cases diffuse across county lines, holding county-level factors constant, and that the diffusion across counties was affected by the closure policies of adjacent states. We then develop a spatial version of the epidemiological susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR) model where new infections arise from interactions between infected people in one state and susceptible people in the same or in neighbouring states. We incorporate lockdown policies into our model and calibrate the model to match both the cumulative and the new infections across the 48 contiguous US states and DC. Our results suggest that had the states with the less restrictive social distancing measures tightened them by one level, the cumulative infections in other states would be about 5% smaller. In our spatial SIR model, the spatial containment policies such as border closures have a bigger impact on flattening the infection curve in the short-run than on the cumulative infections in the long-run.