Whether county lockdown could deter the contagion of COVID-19 in the USA

Abstract

Aim: Whether to lock down a country or not during COVID-19 pandemic becomes a vital issue, since it affects people’s daily life. The objective of this research is to design a measurement that could be utilised to predict the efficacy of a lockdown decision. Methods: One would expect that the effectiveness of lockdown lies in the assumption that the virus spreads from one area to another area in a rippling way. If the virus spreads in a radiating way, then lockdown should be an effective countermeasure to contain the pandemic. On the other hand, if it spreads indiscernibly or randomly, then a lockdown decision would have lesser or little effect on the containment. We mainly combine graphs and metric to compute correlation matrices, which would measure whether the virus spreads in a rippling way. The metric used is to measure the boundary (or county) distances between counties. We take 3073 counties and equivalents in the USA and explore the property of contagion with respect to distance. The distance between any two counties is measured by the number of neighbours (or counties) between them. Then, we study the relation between contagion and distances. The relation between distance (complexity of neighbouring) and confirmed cases (contagion) is further explored. Results: Then, we study the relation between contagion and distances. The relation between distance (complexity of neighbouring) and confirmed cases (contagion) could be explored. Our research shows county lockdown in the USA plays no important role in containing the spread of coronavirus for the time being. Conclusion: Rippling effect in the USA regarding COVID-19 is not significant. This indicates other robust approaches or policies should be taken into consideration, rather than a simple lockdown policy.