COVID19

Response2covid19 (Porcher, 2020) is a dataset tracking public health and economic measures implemented by governments in response to COVID-19. The dataset allows studying the timing and nature of measures implemented by governments, and the perception that citizens have of these measures in a cross-country analysis.

The first goal of the project is to list all measures taken by countries in order to run cross-country and longitudinal comparisons, and to understand the determinants of the similarities between countries. Clusters of countries can be created in this first step. The dataset covers 20 measures taken by 228 governments between January 1, 2020 and October 1, 2020 and is updated every month. The 13 public health measures are coded on a scale of three levels (no measures, partial or strict implementation) and the 7 economic measures are coded in a binary fashion. The measures are used to create two global indexes of interventionism in public health and economics.

The second goal of the project is to study citizens’ reactions to measures taken by governments and the evolution of the perception and beliefs of citizens across time. The data collection is based on scrapping of geotagged tweets and the use of keywords to capture fear, anger and uncertainty about social distancing. The current work covers the United States (Porcher et Renault, 2020) but more countries, including Canada, France or the UK could be covered in further research.