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This study seeks to determine the effects of stay-at-home orders in Spring 2020 on COVID-19 cases and deaths in the Central USA by comparing counties and health service areas that were and that were not subject to statewide orders.

This study estimates the effects of statewide stay-at-home orders on new COVID-19 cases and deaths within 19 central states, of which 14 had stay-at-home orders. It uses synthetic control analysis and nearest neighbor matching to estimate the effects at two geographic levels: counties and health service areas.

Statewide stay-at-home orders significantly reduced the number of new COVID-19 cases in the Central USA starting about three weeks after their effective dates; during the fourth week after their effective dates, the orders reduced the number of new cases per capita by 31%–57%. Statewide stay-at-home orders did not reduce the number of new COVID-19 deaths in the Central USA.

The main purpose of stay-at-home orders in Spring 2020 was to “flatten the curve” so that hospitalizations would not exceed capacity. It is likely that stay-at-home orders in the Central USA reduced hospitalizations to some extent, although the effect on hospitalizations was likely smaller than the effect on cases.

This is the first study of stay-at-home orders in the USA to limit the population to a group of interior states. All coastal states had statewide stay-at-home orders and comparing coastal states with orders to interior states without them may be problematic.

This paper aims to evaluate the early effects of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and accompanying stay-at-home orders on restaurant demand in US counties.

The following two sets of daily restaurant demand data were collected for each US county: foot traffic data and card transaction data. A two-way fixed-effects panel data model was used to estimate daily restaurant demand from February 1 to April 30, 2020.

Results show that a 1% increase in daily new COVID-19 cases led to a 0.0556% decrease in daily restaurant demand, while stay-at-home orders were collectively associated with a 3.25% drop in demand. The extent of these declines varied across counties; ethnicity, political ideology, eat-in habits and restaurant diversity were found to moderate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders.

These results characterize the regional restaurant industry’s resilience to COVID-19 and identify particularly vulnerable areas that may require pubic policies and managerial strategies for intervention.

This study represents a pioneering attempt to investigate the economic impact of COVID-19 on restaurant businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of residential satisfaction in facing the outbreaks of the COVID-19. It reveals the relationship between personal risk perception (PRP), preventive behavior (PB), residential satisfaction (RS) and level of compliance with government recommendations to stay at home (CGRS) of Makkah residents in Saudi Arabia in its effort toward containing the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

A cross-sectional online survey design was used with a sample of 250 respondents from Makkah City selected using a simple random sampling strategy. The instrument for data collection was a developed and validated instruments tag “Risk Perception and Preventive Behavior against COVID-19 Questionnaire (RP-COVID-Q).” The data obtained through the questionnaire were screened and analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical analyses. Similarly, a Partial-Least Square Structural Equation Modeling procedure was adopted to test the hypotheses with a bootstrap mediation effect test.

The results revealed that Makkah residents’ level of PRP, PB and CGRS was not found to vary with gender; however, the RS of the residents differs with respect to their gender. Moreover, the level of PRP was significantly related to PB, RS and level of CGRS. RS increased the likelihood of the Makkah residents to comply with government recommendations against COVID-19 while adherence to PB, which would contribute to the reduction in the spread of the pandemic in Makkah city. Further, the RS is recognized as a significant mediating factor between PRP and CGRS during the COVID-19.

The findings of this study help in understanding the role of residential satisfaction during pandemics and, hence, stressing the important of residential qualities that need improvements for better sustainable cities in the future.

While all countries are strategizing to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, it is equally important to access residential satisfaction in the cities with high visitor inflow. Limited research has been done in Saudi Arabia.

This study aims to examine declines in audit quality after the COVID-19 travel restrictions/stay-at-home orders were issued in the USA in early 2020.

Taking advantage of variation in the dates of stay-at-home orders issued by different US states, this study identifies engagements that were significantly affected by the lock down orders.

The results suggest that engagements affected by the restrictions produced lower audit quality, as measured through restatements and discretionary accruals, relative to those completed before COVID-19 travel restrictions/stay-at-home orders. Further analysis reveals that this decrease in audit quality was attributable to firms with high inventory relative to assets, high R&D expenses relative to assets and non-Big 4 auditors.

This study finds that the restrictions on physical and on-site interaction caused auditors to universally struggle with resource/judgment-intensive accounts such as inventory and R&D expenditures. The results suggest that while Big 4 auditors managed to maintain their status quo level of audit quality following COVID-19 restrictions, non-Big 4 auditors were unable to overcome the challenges of an online work environment and their audit quality declined.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically examine changes in audit quality as a response to a substantial change in auditors’ working environment due to the global health crisis. As work-from-home becomes more prevalent in audit firms, the results suggest that, on average, this move does diminish audit quality.

This study, a content analysis, aims to analyze general communications from law enforcement via agency websites about the COVID-19 pandemic and how this affected police roles. The authors study the extent to which police departments used their websites to inform the public about COVID-19, changes to their policies and additional information they felt necessary to give members of the public. This is important for understanding how the police inform the public during a pandemic and how the pandemic affected their police role.

The data gathered for this project came from a content analysis of the official websites of the largest municipal police departments in the USA. The researchers collected quantitative data from the official websites of law enforcement agencies who serve the 200 largest cities in the USA in March 2020 and coded the information from the websites to determine what themes were most prevalent.

The messages most often provided on department websites included information about COVID-19 (52% of websites included this information), modifications to services (33%) and informing users that services such as fingerprinting would be altered (42%). Websites also reminded the public of restrictions on public gatherings (25%) and stay-at-home orders (38%). Further logistic regression analyses explored significant associations among these variables to understand how police/public communications influenced the role of law enforcement during the pandemic.

Little is known about how law enforcement communicates online with the public during a global pandemic like COVID-19 or how this might affect the police role. Police departments can use their websites to communicate important information to citizens and keep communities updated. Policy implications suggest that agencies continue to update websites with important information and be direct about expectations from the public regarding compliance while also being transparent about how police roles might change.

In this child–parent research study, three adolescents theorize their meaning-making experiences while engaged in exclusive online learning during a three-month stay-at-home mandate. The purpose of this study is to highlight youth-created understandings about their literacy practices during COVID-19 in order to expand possibilities for youth-generated theory.

This child–parent research builds upon a critical dialectical pluralist (CDP) methodology, which is a participatory research method that looks to privilege the child as a co-researcher at every stage of the inquiry. In this research study, the adolescents work together to explore what it means to create and learn alone and then with others via virtual platforms. Research team discussions initially were scaffolded by the parent–researchers, and the adolescents developed their analyses individually and together, and their words and insights situate the findings and conclusions.

The musical form of a motet provides a metaphor that three adolescents used to theorize their meaning-making experiences during the stay-at-home order. The adolescents determined that time, frustration, and space were overarching themes that captured the essence of working alone, and then together, in messy, orchestrated online ensembles.

In this youth-centric research paper, three adolescents create understandings of their meaning-making experiences during the stay-at-home order and work together to determine personal and pedagogical implications.

COVID-19 caused dramatic changes in daily life, including the way people stay in a building. Since the virus's outbreak and the mandate of social distancing from WHO, a house has become an essential place for people to avoid the propagation of the virus. However, recent house configurations cannot satisfy people's needs when staying at home and have not provided complete protection from viruses. Therefore, architects are expected to create new configurations. In order to establish a new trend, this paper aimed to explore the ability of the traditional architectural concepts that discuss the efforts to produce suitable configurations.

To investigate to what extent the traditional Balinese concepts are still relevant to counter infectious diseases, architectural examinations and spatial stories were used as a method of investigations.

This paper found that certain traditional knowledge elements are still relevant to produce suitable configurations to deal with possible virus attacks and introduce more security layers to the house.

Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provides a view of traditional concepts that are now still applicable to modifications and adaptations.

In these modifications, the traditional hierarchy of entering the house and the function of open spaces for food production are traditional elements that address the protocol to face the virus.

Local knowledge has given good things as a precious heritage from the Balinese communities' ancestors to face this new challenge.

This pandemic has taught architects to combine modern technologies with local wisdom as an approach to develop innovative antivirus designs.

The purpose of the study was to provide a comparative analysis on the psychological and socio-cultural impacts of COVID-19 on victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) in South Africa (SA) and the USA.

The authors collected media and scholarly articles that dealt with IPV victims during the early phase of the pandemic. This study focused solely on SA and the USA because of their unique contexts and the fact that the authors are residents of these countries. The authors observed how both presidents dealt with IPV amidst the COVID 19 pandemic, especially when stay-at-home orders were in place. Aspects relating to the psychological and socio-cultural impacts amidst the pandemic were considered.

The authors found that in both countries, many black women from low socio-economic backgrounds experience IPV. Being in isolated spaces with their perpetrators prohibits victims from reporting the abuse. As the world attempts to curb the spread of COVID-19 infections, effective strategies have been suggested for victims and perpetrators. The authors found the approaches of the two governments (until the Biden Administration in 2021) to be starkly different in terms of effective strategies and the neglect and downplaying of the extent of one or both pandemics (i.e. COVID-19 and IPV). Pro-safety, equality, gender and race-conscious embracing approaches to overcome IPV are urgently needed.

The paper focused on IPV during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides relevant information about IPV in both countries, especially when stay-at-home orders are in place.

Mental health is one of the aspects seriously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Governmental preventive measures worldwide disturbed people’s daily routine, social activities, access to education and even impacted their working environment. The present work aims at screening the expected negative effects on mental and psychological wellbeing.

An online survey was introduced through an internet-based platform to assess mental wellbeing (MW) and stress among Egyptian adults using SHORT Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale and Falsification of Type Scale, respectively. Socio-demographics were also collected. Data from 150 respondents through the period from May 25 till June 1 were tabulated and statistical analyses were performed.

More than 70% of respondents declared jobs being affected by the pandemic. Females showed deteriorated state of mental health, together with the youth (≤44 years) and those who lost their jobs or suffered reduced income. In conclusion, mental health as expressed by MW and stress showed to be affected among the Egyptian adults due to the “stay at home” orders. Prompt actions are highly recommended to save vulnerable populations at the time being and from the aggravation of their mental problems in the long term.

The study is the first in Egypt figuring out affected populations and vulnerable categories that need extra care in the future. It provides valuable data and expresses reasonable explanations to the obtained findings. The study also introduces recommendations and highlights hot topics for future research.

In early 2020, the world faced a rapid life-changing pandemic in the form of the Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. Citywide lockdowns with stay-at-home orders and mass closings quickly became the “new normal.” With these new mandates, routine activity, mental health and financial securities all began to experience major deviations, and it became clear that this could prove to be rather valuable in providing the opportunity for large-scale criminology experiments. This study aims to explore New York City's (NYC) crime patterns during this unique social situation. Specifically, has crime as a whole increased or decreased, and have particular crimes increased or decreased during these stressful fluid times?

The authors briefly review previous crises and worldwide trends but focus on NYC crime as collected by the New York Police Department's statistics unit, “CompStat.” An analysis of 13 crime types from March 30 to July 5 was completed, including percent differences and individual weekly incidence rates in citywide crimes compared to the same time in 2019.

The analysis demonstrated that all crimes analyzed, except for murder and burglary, exhibited a statistically significant difference during COVID-19 conditions compared to the same time the previous year. Grand larceny auto and gun violence crimes significantly increased during COVID-19 weeks, whereas rape, other sex crimes, robbery, felony assault, grand larceny, transit, housing, misdemeanor assault and petit larceny all significantly decreased.

Due to the ongoing nature of the pandemic, this is amongst the first studies to examine trends in NYC crime during pandemic mandates. Expanding our knowledge in these situations can inform natural disaster responses, as well as criminal justice policy and practice to better protect the public in future crises.