Database of U.S. Stay at Home Orders at the State, County, and City Level

This is a compilation of government mandated stay-at-home/shelter-in-place orders at the state, county and city level.

Thus far I did not notice any online databases at the COUNTY level. All available databases only referenced state level stay-at-home orders.

The goal of this dataset is to be available to use for inference at a finer level than state mandates.

This data was aggregated from the New York Times's page on stay-at-home orders: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay-at-home-order.html

(Note: As of 4/20/20 the nytimes page has an announcement it will no longer be updated. A new page is covering re-openings, however given that re-openings are occuring sector by sector in many states it is more difficult to track. This dataset will only include stay-at-home implementations and at this time will not be updated to track re-openings.)

The NYT only lists the latest most comprehensive order and updates the page often, therefore the wayback machine was used to gather older county-level orders. The last screenshot available on each day in the archive was used.

A pdf record of each order is in the Documentation folder. When an order could not be easily located, a news-release or other semi-official document is saved. The vast majority of orders have official documents.

The NYT often list the enactment time of the order. If the time is listed and the enactment time is after the typical workday, e.g. 5pm or later, then the "effective" date is listed as the following day. This is chosen because the point of this dataset is to be used with other data to make inferences, and thus seems more important to list when mandates are effective, rather than enacted. If an order is enacted late in the day, it really only becomes effective on the following day. There is likely some measurement error where effective times were late in the day but not listed on the NYT, although this should be found with a more thorough analysis of the source documentation.

The NYT listed orders from states, counties, and cities. However, this compiled dataset should be considered well-represented yet incomplete. There are likely some county/city orders that are missing in this dataset, as it is somewhat difficult to source these orders.

• state: State Name. Available for all rows
• postalcode: State Postal Code
• statefips: State FIPS Code
• county: Name of county
• countyfips: County FIPS CODE, lists as "NA" string for state rows. Is missing for cities. This is because cities tend to overlap into many counties, so it is left up to the user if they want to classify this data or not.
• city: City Name. This field should be missing for counties and states
• effectivedate: "Effective" date of the stay-at-home order, in mm/dd/yyyy format