COVID-19 Pandemic Policies and Health

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted rapid and innovative policymaking around the world at the national, regional, and local levels. The projects below seek to document and characterize new and expanded local U.S. pandemic-era policies to better understand how policy variation and implementation have impacted health and health disparities.

Projects

The U.S. COVID-19 County Policy (UCCP) Database

The goal of this study is to create a national database of local COVID-19-related public health and social policies and to test the hypothesis that these policies have affected racial and socioeconomic disparities in mental health and healthcare utilization. The U.S. COVID-19 County Policy (UCCP) Database seeks to collect systematic, comparable information on county and state policy responses to COVID-19 and aims to provide a reliable record of what local governments have done in response to the pandemic. The policies collected in the database have been grouped into three categories 1) closure and containment policies (e.g., bar and restaurant closures), 2) economic response policies (e.g., housing support), and 3) public health policies (e.g., mask mandates).

We gathered weekly county- and state-level policy data for 2020-2021 for a nationwide sample of over 300 counties (see list below), selected to ensure coverage of over half of the U.S. population in all 50 states and Washington, DC, as well as diversity in racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and urban/rural composition. We will then examine which local COVID-19-related policies contributed to or ameliorated pandemic-related disparities in mental health, health behaviors, and healthcare utilization by linking the policy database with national health data that provide individual-level information on self-reported psychological distress, smoking, alcohol use, and drug use. Led by researchers at the SPHERE Center, the UCCP Database is a collaboration with UCSF and the Louisiana Public Health Institute. The project also involves partnering with an advisory board of policy stakeholders to ensure this work is relevant and has maximum impact.

Funding: NIMH U01; PCORI award

Relevant Materials:

List of Counties in UCCP Database

Data Collection and Interpretation Guide

Publicly Available Data: The datasets used for the current study are available to any investigator at the online portal of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research: https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR39109.

Webinar Recording: University of Michigan COVID-19 Consortium Meeting

Recent Publications: 

The U.S. COVID-19 County Policy Database: a novel resource to support pandemic-related research.

Characterizing the Landscape of Safety Net Programs and Policies in California during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Pandemic-Related Stressors and Health Disparities

While new social and economic policies during the COVID-19 pandemic helped to buffer families from economic hardship, they could not eliminate all of the new stressors families faced during the pandemic. The SPHERE Center conducts research to understand how pandemic stressors influenced health disparities. We have also collaborated with researchers at UC Berkeley and UCANR to conduct surveys among low-income California families to describe their experiences with social stressors and safety net policies during the pandemic.

Funding: NIMH U01, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Tipping Point

Recent Publications:

Associations of U.S. state-level COVID-19 policies intensity with cannabis sharing behaviors in 2020.

Factors associated with anxiety during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States: An analysis of the COVID-19 Citizen Science study.

The Pent-Up Demand for Breastfeeding Among US Women: Trends After COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place.

Experiences of distress and gaps in government safety net supports among parents of young children during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study.