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Association of State-Issued Mask Mandates and Allowing On-Premises Restaurant Dining with County-Level COVID-19 Case and Death Growth Rates - United States, March 1 - December 31, 2020

Date: June 7 2021

Summary: How mask mandates could be correlated with on site dining and COVID death and growth rates

Keywords: #covid #growth #death #mask #mandates #policy #restaurants #archive

Bibliography

G. P. Guy et al., "Association of State-Issued Mask Mandates and Allowing On-Premises Restaurant Dining with County-Level COVID-19 Case and Death Growth Rates β€” United States, March 1–December 31, 2020," MMWR Morb. Mortal. Wkly. Rep., vol. 70, no. 10, pp. 350–354, Mar. 2021, doi: 10.15585/mmwr.mm7010e3.

Table of Contents

    1. Definitions and Background
    2. Equations
    3. Methods
    4. Results
    5. Limitations
  1. How To Cite
  2. References:
  3. Discussion:

Definitions and Background

State-issued mask mandates: Required to wear masks at:

  1. Outside home

  2. Businesses and food establishments.

State-issued restaurant closures: Restaurants not operating or restricting service to takeout, curbside pickup, or delivery.

Providing indoor or outdoor on-premises dining: State lifting a restaurant closure. No distinction was made on how restaurants reopened (such as with reduced capacity, enhanced sanitation, etc.). Per states, if a bar served food, it was coded as a restaurant and if a bar did not serve food, there were bars.

Equations

(1) Daily growth rate :

ln⁑(cumulativecasesordeaths)dayβˆ’ln⁑(cumulativecasesordeaths)dayβˆ’1βˆ—100 \ln(cumulative cases or deaths)_{day} - \ln(cumulative cases or deaths)_{day} - 1 * 100

Methods

Analyses were weighted by county population; standard errors were robust to heteroscedasticity; clustered by state.

Relationship between policies and COVID-19 measured 1–20 days prior to implementation compared with seven mutually exclusive time ranges post-implementation. Associations were examined 60 - 41 and 40 - 21 days before implementation and 1–20, 21–40, 41–60, 61–80, and 81–100 days after implementation.

COVID-19 case and death growth rates were compared via weighted least-squares regression with county and day fixed effects. Four regression models were used for associating mandates and COVID-19 growth rates by controlling for:

QUESTION: I wonder how they controlled for these covariate variables?

Results

Decreases in daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates over these day ranges post-mask mandate implementation were seen:

Permitting on-premises dining saw increases in daily COVID-19 case growth rates

days after reopening.

Increases in daily COVID-19 death growth rates were observed

days after reopening.

During March 1–December 31, 2020, state-issued mask mandates applied in 2,313 (73.6%) of the 3,142 U.S. counties. Post mask mandate COVID case growth rates:

Post mask mandate COVID death growth rates:

QUESTION: Oh so does this suggest that it took about 20 days before we started to see the lagging effects of these mandates?

After > 40 days on-premises dining was permitted, increases in case and death growth rates were observed. Possible explanations:

Limitations

  1. Models not control for other policies like: other types of business closures, physical distancing recommendations, policies issued by localities, and county-level policy variances.

  2. Policy compliance and enforcement not explored.

  3. No differentiating indoor and outdoor dining, ventilation, and following physical distancing and occupancy not investigated.

How To Cite

Zelko, Jacob. Association of State-Issued Mask Mandates and Allowing On-Premises Restaurant Dining with County-Level COVID-19 Case and Death Growth Rates - United States, March 1 - December 31, 2020. https://jacobzelko.com/06072021210734-mask-mandates-association. June 7 2021.

References:

Discussion:

CC BY-SA 4.0 Jacob Zelko. Last modified: November 24, 2023. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.