The impact of policy timing on the spread of COVID-19

We model COVID-19 data for 89 nations and US states with a recently developed formalism that describes mathematically any pattern of growth with the minimum number of parameters. The results show that the disease has a typical duration of 18 days, with a significant increase in fatality when it lasts longer than about 4 months. Searching for correlations between “flattening of the curve” and preventive public policies, we find strong statistical evidence for the impact of the first implemented policy on decreasing the pandemic growth rate; a delay of one week in implementation nearly triples the size of the infected population, on average. Without any government action, the initial outburst still slows down after 36 days, possibly thanks to changes in public behavior in response to the pandemic toll. Stay-at-home (lockdown) was not the first policy of any sample member, and we could not find statistically meaningful evidence for its added impact, similar to a recent study that employed an entirely different approach. However, lockdown was mostly imposed only shortly before the exponential rise was arrested by other measures, too late for a meaningful impact. A third of the sample members that did implement lockdown imposed it only after the outburst had already started to slow down. The possibility remains that lockdown might have significantly shortened the initial exponential rise had it been employed as first resort rather than last.