We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID-19 “hotspots” (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after...

To understand the extent to which a policy mandate’s early adoption is crucial in crisis management, we leverage unique worldwide data that record the daily evolution of policy mandate adoptions and COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. The analysis shows that the mask mandate, especially...