Observational Study of the Effect of the Juvenile Stay-At-Home Order on SARS-CoV-2 Infection Spread in Saline County, Arkansas

Abstract

We assess the treatment effect of juvenile stay-at-home orders (JSAHO) on reducing the rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection spread in Saline County (“Saline”), Arkansas, by examining the difference between Saline’s and control Arkansas counties’ changes in daily and mean log infection rates of pretreatment (March 28–April 5, 2020) and treatment periods (April 6–May 6, 2020). A synthetic control county is constructed based on the parallel-trends assumption, least-squares fitting on pretreatment and socio-demographic covariates, and elastic-net-based methods, from which the counterfactual outcome is predicted and the treatment effect is estimated using the difference-in-differences, the synthetic control, and the changes-in-changes methodologies. Both the daily and average treatment effects of JSAHO are shown to be significant. Despite its narrow scope and lack of enforcement for compliance, JSAHO reduced the rate of the infection spread in Saline. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

KEYWORDS:

• Changes-in-changes
• Conformal inference
• Counterfactual prediction
• COVID-19
• Difference-in-differences
• Elastic-net
• SARS-CoV-2
• Stay-at-home order
• Synthetic control

Supplementary Materials

The supplementary materials contain two sections: (1) Estimation of treatment effect using raw infection count data, and (2) Supplemental Tables.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge support by NSF DMS 1812148 and PSC-CUNY grant 62781-00 50 grant.

Notes

1 This assumption underlies the difference-in-differences methodology of estimating the counterfactual outcomes.

2 These are used in various forms of the counterfactual estimation methodology known as the synthetic control.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge support by NSF DMS 1812148 and PSC-CUNY grant 62781-00 50 grant.