Pillar 1
Sentinel alert system/waste water
Need
Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing guidelines and mask requirements have been adopted and implemented relatively widely across the U.S., individual states, counties, and municipalities. To date, these policy decisions have been made with limited empirical evidence about how loosening and lifting NPIs might affect disease spread or the likelihood of resurgence. Existing efforts to track NPIs focus on a relatively small set of interventions or have been limited to state-level measures, overlooking county and city-level NPIs. As a result, epidemiologists are unable to evaluate how particular NPI combinations affect disease spread, and policy makers remain in the dark about how to ease restrictions without prompting disease resurgence.
Proposed Solution
As jurisdictions turn their attention to re-opening segments of their economies, there is a critically urgent need for accurate, detailed, and comprehensive measures of NPIs that can be used to inform epidemiological models and provide empirical evidence to support policy decisions.
Statement of Work
We are developing a one-of-a-kind database of NPIs implemented in the U.S. that measures and tracks variation in spatial scale, scope, mandatory nature, and temporal duration of NPIs adopted at the state, county, and municipal level. These measures will allow us to analyze effects of policy variation on COVID-19 incidence, and will be made available to the larger public health and epidemiology research communities.
