IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0308244.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

What drives the effectiveness of social distancing in combating COVID-19 across U.S. states?

Author

Listed:
  • Mu-Jeung Yang
  • Maclean Gaulin
  • Nathan Seegert
  • Yang Fan

Abstract

We propose a new theory of information-based voluntary social distancing in which people’s responses to disease prevalence depend on the credibility of reported cases and fatalities and vary locally. We embed this theory into a new pandemic prediction and policy analysis framework that blends compartmental epidemiological/economic models with Machine Learning. We find that lockdown effectiveness varies widely across US States during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that voluntary social distancing is higher in more informed states, and increasing information could have substantially changed social distancing and fatalities.

Suggested Citation

  • Mu-Jeung Yang & Maclean Gaulin & Nathan Seegert & Yang Fan, 2025. "What drives the effectiveness of social distancing in combating COVID-19 across U.S. states?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 20(5), pages 1-35, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0308244
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308244
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0308244
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0308244&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0308244?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0308244. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.