All EU Member States were affected by the coronavirus outbreak. In response, national governments implemented containment measures such as closure of schools, cancelation of public events, limit to the number of people that can meet in public and private spaces, closure of public services and facilities, change in policies around prisons to mitigate the spread of the disease, limitations to the populations living in camps and/or camp like conditions, partial and full lockdowns.
These non-pharmaceutical interventions focus on reducing peoples’ mobility and social interactions.
However, the causal impact of different COVID-19 confinement policies on how mobility trends have changed after the spread of the epidemic has not been studied for the EU Member States. This is crucial also for answering the question when and how the confinement measures can be relaxed, besides avoiding unpreparedness to possible new wave of cases and introduction of new measures if needed.
In this report, we adopt a quasi-experimental approach to measure the impact of COVID-19 confinement policies on peoples’ presence at home and their mobility in different types of public and private places.
Our empirical findings indicate that reductions in out-of-home social interactions and visits to public and private places are driven by a combination of restrictive measures introduced by Member States. Not surprisingly, the analysis suggests that partial and full lockdowns
have the strongest causal impact on increasing presence at home and reducing visits to workplaces, public transport hubs, grocery, pharmacies, open public spaces, restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theatres. The impact
of public services closure and schools closure is significant but of a smaller magnitude. At the COVID-19 outbreak in EU, policy measures such as large gathering bans and changes in prison policies seem to have had no significant causal impact on communities’ overall mobility trends, but may have had some impact upon social distancing behaviour. We cannot measure the “pairwise” distance between individuals via this data set and so cannot use it to measure social distancing trends in a direct sense. Interestingly, our results also show that the lockdown of people living in camps and/or camp like conditions, such as refugees and other minorities, had a statistically significant negative effect on visits to places like national parks, public beaches, marinas, dog parks, plazas, and public gardens.
However, it should be noted here that this result is attributed to two countries: Greece and Malta are the only Member States that implemented this confinement policy.
This is a preparatory study and when more data will become available (we utilize daily changes in mobility trends), we will update this report with better estimates. In the future, we also intend to estimate the causal effect of social interactions and presence at home on the reported cases and deaths in the EU.
LAPATINAS Athanasios;
2020-06-17
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC120972
978-92-76-19620-4 (online),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 30258 EN,
OP KJ-NA-30258-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC120972,
10.2760/875644 (online),
