Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-22-2021
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has called for and generated massive novel government regulations to increase social distancing for the purpose of reducing disease transmission. A number of studies have attempted to guide and measure the effectiveness of these policies, but there has been less focus on the overall efficiency of these policies. Efficient social distancing requires implementing stricter restrictions during periods of high viral prevalence and rationing social contact to disproportionately preserve gatherings that produce a good ratio of benefits to transmission risk. To evaluate whether U.S. social distancing policy actually produced an efficient social distancing regime, we tracked consumer preferences for, visits to, and crowding in public locations of 26 different types. We show that the United States’ rationing of public spaces, postspring 2020, has failed to achieve efficiency along either dimension. In April 2020, the United States did achieve notable decreases in visits to public spaces and focused these reductions at locations that offer poor benefit-to-risk tradeoffs. However, this achievement was marred by an increase, from March to April, in crowding at remaining locations due to fewer locations remaining open. In December 2020, at the height of the pandemic so far, crowding in and total visits to locations were higher than in February, before the U.S. pandemic, and these increases were concentrated in locations with the worst value-to-risk tradeoff.
Recommended Citation
Benzell, S.G., Collis, A., & Nicolaides, C. (2021). The efficiency of U.S. public space utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic. Risk Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13800
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Economic Theory Commons, Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons, Other Business Commons, Other Economics Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Risk Analysis in 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13800
This scholarship is part of the Chapman University COVID-19 Archives.