County-Level Stay-At-Home Orders During the COVID-19 Pandemic

U.S. county-level data tracks state and territorial executive orders, administrative orders, resolutions, and proclamations related to COVID-19 stay-at-home requirements from March 15, 2020, to August 15, 2021. The data was collected and coded by the CDC's COVID-19 Community Intervention and At-Risk Task Force and Public Health Law Program from official government sources.

Use Cases

• Analyze temporal patterns of Stay_at_Home_Order_Recommendation activation by County_Name and State_Tribe_Territory.
• Map the geographic spread of orders using FIPS_County and FIPS_State codes to visualize policy adoption.
• Study the correlation between Order_code types and Express_Preemption clauses across different jurisdictions.
• Trace the legal provenance of orders by linking Citation and URL fields to original government documents.

Strengths

• Data covers a defined 17-month period from March 15, 2020, to August 15, 2021.
• Includes granular county-level breakdowns via FIPS_County and County_Name for states with county-specific orders.
• Sources are limited to official government documents or press releases, excluding news media, to ensure accuracy.

Limitations

• Dataset excludes mandatory business closures, curfews, and gathering limitations, providing only a partial view of restrictions.
• Row count and total geographic coverage are unknown, making sample size assessment impossible.
• Data is temporally stale, with no updates since the collection period ended in August 2021.

Provenance

Source

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID-19 Community Intervention and At-Risk Task Force, and Public Health Law Program.

Collection Method

Orders were collected from government websites, cataloged, and coded in Microsoft Excel by one coder with quality assurance from additional coders.

Time Range

March 15, 2020 – August 15, 2021

Freshness

Last updated on September 10, 2021; update frequency is unspecified.

Geography

United States states, territories, and tribes, broken down to the county level where applicable.