President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita declared a state of emergency and implemented a curfew from 9 pm to 5 am in hopes of limiting the spread of the virus. Just two days later, on March 28 and after an additional 14 positive cases, Mali witnessed its first COVID-19 related death (WHO, 2020). The Oxford COVID-19 government’s response tracker (Hale _et al._ , 2020) suggests that the Mali government, in order to control the spread of the virus, imposed restrictions as stringent as in North American and Western European countries (see Figure A1 in the Supplemental Appendix).

Figure 1 shows a seven-day moving average of new daily COVID-19 infection and death counts in Mali, as well as in three of the largest urban centers—Bamako, Sikasso, and Segou—from April through July 2020. These data are collected by the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and made available via the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDE, 2020). Figure 1 highlights three important details about the coronavirus pandemic in Mali. First, and most important for our empirical approach, through about the middle of April 2020, almost all recorded COVID-19 infections and all COVID-19 deaths occurred in Bamako. It was not until the middle of May when the trends in both infections and deaths diverged between Mali and Bamako. Second, other relatively large urban centers— Sikasso and Segou—did not experience anything close to the number of COVID-19 infections or deaths recorded in Bamako. Aside from a small and short-lived increase in infections in Sikasso at the beginning of June, infections and deaths in Sikasso and Segou remained relatively flat from April through July 2020. Finally, the worst of the pandemic for Mali may be in the past, assuming of course no future wave of COVID-19 infections. By the end of July 2020, daily infection counts were more than half of their peak in previous months and some days have zero recorded COVID-19 deaths.<sup>5</sup> Taken together, these data suggest that the coronavirus pandemic to date has been most disruptive in Bamako.

We observe that pandemic-related disruptions were more intense in Bamako and surrounding urban areas than in remote rural areas of Mali in three distinct sources of data. First, as shown in Figure 1 and discussed above, using data on _recorded_ COVID-19 infection and death counts we observe that both of these indicators are dramatically skewed toward Bamako. Although these recorded infections and deaths likely underestimate the true incidence of infections and deaths, particularly outside Bamako (UNICEF, 2020), they are indicators that influence containment policy efforts and motivate fear among individuals of contracting the virus in Bamako specifically. Therefore, for the purposes of our study, they support the observation that the intensity of pandemic-related disruptions was greater in urban areas than in rural areas in Mali.

We now turn to Google’s Community Mobility Reports, our second source of information on the intensity of pandemic-related disruptions in Mali. For the purpose of contributing to an understanding of the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, Google released anonymized and aggregated data from users who have turned on the location history setting of their Google account. These same data are

> 5To be clear, these data do not suggest that the coronavirus pandemic is no longer a critical concern for Mali. Indeed, these data only report _recorded_ COVID-19 infections and deaths. Considering the likely limited COVID-19 testing and death monitoring capacity in Mali, especially outside Bamako and other urban areas, these reported figures may dramatically underestimate the true incidence of infections and deaths (UNICEF, 2020). Moreover the long-term consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, not just in Mali but throughout the world, are sill unknown.

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