What Motivated Mitigation Policies? A Network-Based Longitudinal Analysis of State-Level Mitigation Strategies

Abstract: Understanding which factors informed pandemic response can help create a more nuanced perspective on how each state of the United States handled the crisis. To this end, we create various networks linking states together based on their similarity in mitigation policies, politics, geographic proximity and COVID-19 case data. We use these networks to analyze the correlation between pandemic policies and politics, location and case-load from January 2020 through March 2022. We show that the best predictors of a state's response is an aggregate political affiliation rather than solely governor affiliation as others have shown. Further, we illustrate that political affiliation is heavily correlated with policy intensity from June 2020 through June 2021, but has little impact on policy after June 2021. In contrast, geographic proximity and daily incidence are not consistently correlated with state's having similar mitigation policies.