A transnational and transregional study of the impact and effectiveness of social distancing for COVID-19 mitigation

We present an analysis of the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and a social distancing metric from data for all the states and most populous cities in the United States and Brazil, all the 22 European Economic Community countries and the United Kingdom. We discuss why the infection rate, instead of the effective reproduction number or growth rate of cases, is a proper choice to perform this analysis when considering a wide span of time. We obtain a strong Spearman’s rank order correlation between the social distancing metric and the infection rate in each locality. We show that mask mandates increase the values of Spearman’s correlation in the United States, where a mandate was adopted. We also obtain an explicit numerical relation between the infection rate and the social distancing metric defined in the present work.