County-Specific, Real-Time Projection of the Effect of Business Closures on the COVID-19 Pandemic

Public health policies such as business closures have been one of our most effective tools in slowing the spread of COVID-19, but they also impose costs. This has created demand from policy makers for models which can predict when and where such policies will be most effective to head off a surge and where they could safely be loosened. No current model combines data-driven, real-time policy effect predictions with county-level granularity. We present a neural net-based model for predicting the effect of business closures or re-openings on the COVID-19 time-varying reproduction number R _t in real time for every county in California. When trained on data from May through September the model accurately captured relative county dynamics during the October/November California COVID-19 surge ( r ² = 0.76), indicating robust out-of-sample performance. To showcase the model’s potential utility we present a case study of various counties in mid-October. Even when counties imposed similar restrictions at the time, our model successfully distinguished counties in need of drastic and immediate action to head off a surge from counties in less dire need of intervention. While this study focuses on business closures in California, the presented model architecture could be applied to other policies around world.