COVID-19 with Stigma: New Evidence from Mobility Data and “Go to Travel” Campaign

This study analyzes the stigma model under the context of COVID-19 by using evidence of the Japanese prefectures and the theoretical model proposed by Katafuchi et al. (2020). The authors propose that people refrain from going out under the declaration of emergency because of a psychological cost, which is composed of two elements: infection risk and a social stigma. In their paper, the stigma works as a force to encourage people to stay at home with the implied purpose of protecting community health. Nevertheless, the new evidence we present, using data of the Go to travel campaign, suggests that the stigma proposed by the authors works when there is a public policy that encourages people to stay at home (emergency state); however, it fails when the public policy encourage human mobility (Go to travel). In other words, the stigma is not independent of the public policy. For this purpose, we use a panel data model with information on prefectural mobility, emergency statement dummy, Go to travel campaign dummy, and COVID-19 daily positive rates of infections.