Moderate restrictions can slow the spread of COVID -- if they're timely

1 – Mitigation strategies can, indeed, curb spread of the virus
Throughout the pandemic, states — and even counties and cities within those states — have often done their own thing. Transmission has varied, residents’ willingness to comply with restrictions has varied. Especially in the beginning, it was a real grab bag, says Lakdawala.

“A lot of states were putting [restrictions] on and then taking them off and then putting them on and taking them off — it was really haphazard,” she says.

To understand whether — and how — each type of restriction was making an impact on case trajectories, Lakdawala’s team divided them into categories — stay-at-home orders, non-essential business restrictions, indoor gathering limitations, restaurant or bar restrictions, and mask mandates — and assessed how stringent each of the measures were.

Then, with the help of Rebecca Nugent, the head of the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University, they created graphs of each state’s cases and deaths, showing the dates when restrictions were put into place or lifted.