This paper evaluates the dynamic impact of various policies , such as school, business, and restaurant closures, adopted by the US states on the growth rates of confirmed Covid-19 cases and  social distancing behavior measured by Google Mobility Reports, where we take into consideration of people's voluntarily behavioral response to new information of transmission risks. Using the US state-level data, our analysis finds that both policies and information on transmission risks are important determinants of people's social distancing behavior, and shows that a change in policies explains a large fraction of observed changes in social distancing behavior. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that removing all policies would have lead to 30 to 200 times more additional cases by late May. Removing only the non-essential businesses closures (while maintaining  restrictions on movie theaters and restaurants) would have increased the weekly growth rate of cases between -0.02 and 0.06 and would have lead to -10\% to 40\% more cases by late May. Finally, nationally mandating face masks for employees on April 1st would have reduced the case growth rate by 0.1-0.25. This leads to 30\% to 57\% fewer reported cases by late May , which translates into, roughly, 30-57 thousand saved lives .
This paper evaluates the dynamic impact of various policies adopted by US states on the growth rates of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths as well as social distancing behavior measured by Google Mobility Reports, where we take into consideration people's voluntarily behavioral response to new information of transmission risks. Our analysis finds that both policies and information on transmission risks are important determinants of Covid-19 cases and deaths and shows that a change in policies explains a large fraction of observed changes in social distancing behavior. Our counterfactual experiments suggest that nationally mandating face masks for employees on April 1st could have reduced the growth rate of cases and deaths by more than 10 percentage points in late April, and could have led to as much as 17 to 55 percent less deaths nationally by the end of May, which roughly translates into 17 to 55 thousand saved lives. Our estimates imply that removing non-essential business closures (while maintaining school closures, restrictions on movie theaters and restaurants) could have led to -20 to 60 percent more cases and deaths by the end of May. We also find that, without stay-at-home orders, cases would have been larger by 25 to 170 percent, which implies that 0.5 to 3.4 million more Americans could have been infected if stay-at-home orders had not been implemented. Finally, not having implemented any policies could have led to at least a 7 fold increase with an uninformative upper bound in cases (and deaths) by the end of May in the US, with considerable uncertainty over the effects of school closures, which had little cross-sectional variation .
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55 percent less deaths nationally by the end of May, which roughly translates into 17 to 55 thousand saved lives. Our estimates imply that removing
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would have increased the weekly growth rate of cases between -0.02 and 0.06 and would have lead to -10\% to 40\% more cases by late May. Finally, nationally mandating face masks for employees on April 1st would have reduced the case growth rate by 0.1-0.25. This leads to 30\% to 57\% fewer reported cases by late May , which translates into, roughly, 30-57 thousand saved lives
could have led to -20 to 60 percent more cases and deaths by the end of May. We also find that, without stay-at-home orders, cases would have been larger by 25 to 170 percent, which implies that 0.5 to 3.4 million more Americans could have been infected if stay-at-home orders had not been implemented. Finally, not having implemented any policies could have led to at least a 7 fold increase with an uninformative upper bound in cases (and deaths) by the end of May in the US, with considerable uncertainty over the effects of school closures, which had little cross-sectional variation