Cities are scrambling to reopen their economy amid the COVID-19 crisis. We all want the same thing: to send people back to work while minimizing infections and deaths. But each reopening strategy balances economic and health outcomes in different ways—and no two cities are exactly the same.Explore the impacts of different reopening strategies with the tool below. It illustrates our research paper, which predicts the effects of granular policy decisions in specific United States cities. The underlying model is based on anonymized interactions from cell phone data. Learn more below about our data and methodology.
The tool shows how policy choices change the number of interactions between specific types of individuals. These interactions affect how many people are able to go to work, and how many people will go on to get sick. See how some policy combinations help reduce unemployment and deaths, some prioritize the health or the economy, and some help neither cause.
Socioeconomic Network Heterogeneity and Pandemic Policy Response
Authors: Mohammad Akbarpour, Cody Cook, Aude Marzuoli, Simon Mongey, Abhishek Nagaraj, Matteo Saccarolak, Pietro Tebaldi, Shoshana Vasserman, Hanbin Yang
From: Stanford University, Replica, University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, Harvard University
