Open data for COVID-19 policy analysis and mapping

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, governments around the world began to implement policies to mitigate and manage the outbreak. Significant research efforts were deployed to track and analyse these policies in real-time to better inform the response. While much of the policy analysis focused narrowly on social distancing measures designed to slow the spread of disease, here, we present a dataset focused on capturing the breadth of policy types implemented by jurisdictions globally across the whole-of-government. COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (COVID AMP) includes nearly 50,000 policy measures from 150 countries, 124 intermediate areas, and 235 local areas between January 2020 and June 2022. With up to 40 structured and unstructured characteristics encoded per policy, as well as the original source and policy text, this dataset provides a uniquely broad capture of the governance strategies for pandemic response, serving as a critical data source for future work in legal epidemiology and political science.

Fig. 1

Geographic policy data coverage of the COVID-AMP dataset from January 2020 to June 2022 (a) Total number of policies captured for each country. There are 152 countries for which at least 1 policy is coded. (b) Total number of policies captured for each U.S. state. All 50 states and territories were coded comprehensively.

Fig. 2

Policy distribution by category and month. The month for each policy was the effective start date. Note that although the official time scope of the dataset is January 2020 to June 2022, the x-axis extends to January 2023 to show that there has been limited data collected outside of this range for some jurisdictions. (a) Distribution of policies globally. (b) Distribution of policies for the United States.

Fig. 3

Economic policies implemented in the United States as of June 2022. (a) Relative proportion of economic relief policies (from the “Enabling and relief category) enacted over time by policy subcategory. (b) Relative number of regulatory relief policies implemented at the state-level. (c) Relative number of eviction and foreclosure delay policies implemented at the state-level. (d) Relative number of policies implementing modifications to unemployment benefits at the state-level.

Fig. 4

Heat map shows the co-occurrence of policy subcategories and policy targets globally, with the darkest squares representing the most overlap. The x-axis shows lists the policy targets, and the y-axis lists the policy subcategories.