Sars-Cov-2 in Argentina: Lockdown, Mobility, and Contagion

There is a debate in Argentina about the effectiveness of mandatory lockdown measures in containing COVID-19 that lasts five months making it one of the longest in the World. The population effort to comply the lockdown has been decreasing over time given the economic and social costs that it entails. We contributes by analyzing the Argentinian case through information of mobility and contagion given answers to recurrent questions on these topics. This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by assessing the effects of lockdown measures and the regional relaxation on the numbers of rate of new infections. We also respond to issues of internal political discussion on regional contagion and the effect of marches and unexpected crowd events. We use pool, fixed and random effects panel data modeling and Granger causality tests identifying relations between mobility and contagion. Our results show that lockdown in Argentina has been effective in reducing the mobility but not in way that reduces the rate of contagion. Strict lockdown seems to be effective in short periods of time and by extend it without complementary measures loss effectiveness. Contagion rate seems to be discretely displaced in time and resurging amidst slowly increasing in mobility.