Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2024 Apr:53:101365.
doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2024.101365. Epub 2024 Feb 5.

A tale of lockdown policies on the transmission of COVID-19 within and between Chinese cities: A study based on heterogeneous treatment effect

Jingjing Li  1 , Chu Zhuang  2 , Wei Zou  3
Affiliations
Free article

A tale of lockdown policies on the transmission of COVID-19 within and between Chinese cities: A study based on heterogeneous treatment effect

Jingjing Li et al. Econ Hum Biol. 2024 Apr.
Free article

Abstract

During the early outbreak phase of COVID-19 in China, lockdowns prevailed as the only available policy tools to mitigate the spread of infection. To evaluate the impact of lockdown policies in the context of the first phase of COVID-19 pandemic, we leverage data on daily confirmed cases per million people and related characteristics of a large set of cities. The study analyzed 369 Chinese cities, among which 188 implemented lockdowns of varying severity levels from January 23 to March 31, 2020. We use nationwide Baidu Mobility data to estimate the impact of lockdown policies on mitigating COVID-19 cases through reducing human mobility. We adopt a heterogeneous treatment effect model to quantify the effect of lockdown policies on containing confirmed case counts. Our results suggest that lockdowns substantially reduced human mobility, and larger reduction in mobility occurred within-city compared to between-city. The COVID-19 daily confirmed cases per million people decreased by 9% - 9.2% for every ten-percentage point fall in within-city travel intensity in t+7 timeframe. We also find that one city's lockdowns can effectively reduce the spillover cases of the traveler's destination cities. We find no evidence that stricter lockdowns are more effective at mitigating COVID-19 risks. Our findings provide practical insights about the effectiveness of NPI during the early outbreak phase of the unprecedented pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Lockdown Policies; Non-pharmaceutical interventions; Pandemic.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest All data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Awards #71973102) and the Chinese National Funding of Social Science (#20&ZD168). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of funders. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. The manuscript does not contain human studies (i.e., patients) or experimental animal studies and upholds rigorous ethical standards and guidelines. All data used in the study are de-identified and publicly available. The study is not a clinical trial.