🔍 Overview:
A new set of six daily indices measures the intensity of government COVID-19 policies across distinct domains, enabling clearer cross-national comparisons of how tightly governments regulated social and economic life during the pandemic.
📊 How the measures were built:
- Six domain-specific indices: social distancing, schools, businesses, health monitoring, health resources, and mask wearing.
- Combined two comprehensive event- and stringency-focused datasets: the CoronaNet COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker.
- Implemented a Bayesian time-varying measurement model to fuse information and produce daily scores.
- Coverage: daily indices for more than 180 countries from 1 January 2020 to 14 January 2021.
⚙️ What the indices capture:
- Aggregate summaries that quantify the intensity of a country’s policy response within each domain on each day.
- Domain-level intensity (rather than a single aggregate score) to distinguish where and how governments concentrated their efforts.
📈 Key findings:
- The new indices help clarify previous evidence about lockdowns and their role in preventing infections during the early pandemic period.
- In analyses of policy adoption, countries with higher levels of democracy and greater economic interdependence tended to implement less intense policy responses.
- The domain-specific, time-varying measures make it possible to trace policy intensity shifts day-by-day and compare policy emphases across countries.
🧭 Why it matters:
These measures provide researchers and policymakers with more precise, comparable tools for studying which policies were used, when, and how intensely—improving tests of policy effectiveness and explanations for cross-national variation in pandemic responses.
