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Covid-19 and Legislative Activity: A Cross-National Study
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Abstract and Figures
Insufficient attention has been given to studying a vital organ jeopardized by covid-19: legislatures. Legislatures across the globe have been shut down or limited due to covid-19. In a comprehensive multidisciplinary study, exploring legislatures across 159 countries, we show that there is no causal relation between the severity of covid-19 and limitations on legislatures’ operation. This suggests that legislatures are at risk of being shut down either due to unfounded fear from covid-19 or as an excuse for silencing legislatures. We find that legislatures in healthy democracies are relatively immune to this risk, while those in frail democracies and authoritarian regimes are more at risk of becoming casualties of covid-19. In partially free countries, the use of technology can mitigate this risk.
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Significance
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of the impact of lockdown measures introduced in response to the spread of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on socioeconomic conditions of Italian citizens. We leverage a massive near–real-time dataset of human mobility and we model mobility restrictions as an exogenous shock to the economy, similar to a natural disaster. We find that lockdown measures have a twofold effect: First, their impact on mobility is stronger in municipalities with higher fiscal capacity; second, they induce a segregation effect: mobility contraction is stronger in municipalities where inequality is higher and income per capita is lower. We highlight the necessity of fiscal measures that account for these effects, targeting poverty and inequality mitigation.
We can exploit randomized controlled trials, compartmental models, and spillovers.
Significance
The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 challenges globalized societies. Scientific and technological cross-fertilization yields broad availability of georeferenced epidemiological data and of modeling tools that aid decisions on emergency management. To this end, spatially explicit models of the COVID-19 epidemic that include e.g. regional individual mobilities, the progression of social distancing, and local capacity of medical infrastructure provide significant information. Data-tailored spatial resolutions that model the disease spread geography can include details of interventions at the proper geographical scale. Based on them, it is possible to quantify the effect of local containment measures (like diachronic spatial maps of averted hospitalizations) and the assessment of the spatial and temporal planning of the needs of emergency measures and medical infrastructure as a major contingency planning aid.
COVID-19 hits all of the cognitive triggers for how the lay public misjudges risk. Robust findings from the field of risk perception have identified unique characteristics of a risk that allow for greater attribution of frequency and probability than is likely to be aligned with the base-rate statistics of the risk. COVID-19 embodies these features. It is unfamiliar, invisible, dreaded, potentially endemic, involuntary, disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations such as the elderly and has the potential for widespread catastrophe. When risks with such characteristics emerge, it is imperative for there to be trust between those in governance and communication and the lay public in order to quell public fears. This is not the environment in which COVID-19 has emerged, potentially resulting in even greater perceptions of risk.
As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to claim lives around the planet, the United States observes the bitter anniversaries of two tragedies: its most damaging volcanic eruption and its largest marine oil spill. Forty years ago, on 18 May 1980, Mount St. Helens volcano erupted in Washington state, claiming 57 lives and triggering an enduring legacy of downstream sediment and hydrogeologic disruptions (see the Perspective by J. J. Major on page 704). Just 10 years ago, the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill began on 20 April 2010 and continued to release oil for 87 days into the Gulf of Mexico from a damaged deep-sea well before it was finally capped. Eleven rig workers died in the explosion. As we all continue to struggle with the current pandemic crisis, it is an opportune time to ask what lessons in the response to previous catastrophes should not be forgotten.
The question is not whether to use new data sources but how
Researchers sift through data to compare nations’ vastly different containment measures. Researchers sift through data to compare nations’ vastly different containment measures.
