Insofar as the COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold, in real time, scholarly efforts to study various aspects of this crisis may be somewhat premature. That said, the “floodgates” of “COVID-19” studies have already opened and are unlikely close anytime soon.
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all U.S. states issued stay-at-home orders designed to restrict the movement of people and help realize public-health dividends. The orders triggered an array of “considerable” costs, however. In The Impact of the Coronavirus Lockdown on Domestic Violence, Sarath Sanga (Northwestern) & Justin McCray (Columbia) explore one such potential cost: An increase in domestic violence. The authors exploit a database of “approximately 50 million 911 call records from 14 large U.S. cities. We also obtain mobile device location data from these same cities.” The paper’s key results are summarized in the abstract.
We use 911 call records and mobile device location data to study the impact of the coronavirus lockdown on domestic violence. The percent of people at home sharply increased at all hours, and nearly doubled during regular working hours, from 45 to 85 percent. Domestic violence increased 12 percent on average and 20 percent during working hours. Using neighborhood-level identifiers, we show that the rate of first-time abuse likely increased even more: 16 percent on average and 23 percent during working hours. Our results contribute to an urgent need to quantify the physical and psychological burdens of prolonged lockdown polices"
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