The Association of Stay-at-Home Orders and the Spread of COVID-19 in Rural and Urban United States

Background: Throughout the spring of 2020, stay-at-home orders were imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19. There is limited data on the effectiveness of stay-at-home orders, particularly in rural as compared to urban areas. Objective: To examine the association between stay-at-home order implementation and the incidence of COVID-19 in rural vs. urban counties. Design: Interrupted time series analysis using a mixed effects zero-inflated Poisson model. Participants: 3,142 U.S. counties. Interventions: Stay-at-home orders. Main Measures: COVID-19 daily incidence (primary) and mobility (secondary and intermediate measure of stay-at-home effectiveness) Key Results: Stay-at-home orders were implemented later (median March 30 vs. March 28) and were shorter (median 35 vs. 54 days) in rural than urban counties. Indoor mobility was, on average, 2.6-6.9% higher in rural than urban counties both during and after stay-at-home orders. Compared to the baseline (pre-stay-at-home) period, the number of new COVID-19 cases increased under stay-at-home by IRR 1.60 (95% CI, 1.57-1.64) in rural and 1.36 (95% CI, 1.30-1.42) in urban counties. For each day under stay-at-home orders, the number of new cases changed by a factor of 0.982 (95% CI 0.981-0.982) in rural and 0.952 (95% CI, 0.951-0.953) in urban counties compared to prior to stay-at-home. Each day after stay-at-home orders expired, the number of new cases changed by a factor of 0.995 (95% CI, 0.994-0.995) in rural and 0.997 (95% CI, 0.995-0.999) in urban counties compared to prior to stay-at-home. Conclusion: Stay-at-home orders decreased mobility and slowed the spread of COVID-19, but less effectively in rural than in urban counties. This necessitates a critical reevaluation of how stay-at-home orders are designed, communicated, and implemented in rural areas.

A teaching note on the controllability “Principle” and performance measurement

Purpose The purpose of this note is to expose accounting students and others to recent findings in management control, specifically to the relationship between the informativeness of a performance measure and its usefulness in performance evaluation. Design/methodology/approach Numerical examples illuminate key ideas and are easy to follow and replicate by students. Findings Seemingly in contradiction to the controllability principle, performance measures that are informative about actions taken by employees are not necessarily useful for performance evaluation. This occurs when the performance being measured is related to an intermediate task, such as prepping items prior to final assembly. If prepping is an important factor in the quality of not only the intermediate good but also the finished good, and the quality of the finished good can be reasonably measured, it may not be useful to measure the prepping performance. This result holds even if obtaining the intermediate measure is costless and the intermediate measure provides unique information on the effort given to the intermediate task. Originality/value Opportunities to measure employees’ intermediate outputs are ubiquitous; therefore, judicious decisions should be made regarding the use of limited monitoring resources. This note contains intuitive, easy-to-follow illustrations (based on recent findings) that will help students and others identify situations where such evaluations are more and less useful.

The effects of a comprehensive teaching program on dribbling and passing decision-making and execution skills of young footballers

<div>The importance of decision-making on what to do and skill execution within sport expertise has been emphasized in many research studies. Thus, the aim of this study was to assess the effect of a 22-session comprehensive teaching program on tactical behavior in agreement with different actions (passing and dribbling) in young footballers. This program was based on the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) model (Bunker &amp; Thorpe, 1982). A quasi-experimental design intervention was developed with nine footballers (U-12) over a 15-week period, which was divided into two phases: pre-intervention (comprised of six sessions and measured during three matches) and intervention (comprised of 22 sessions and measured during 12 matches). Two measures were carried out during the latter phase: an intermediate measure during the First 11 sessions, and a final measure, during the remaining 11 sessions. A total of 2 432 actions were observed (1 793 passes and 639 dribbling actions). Results showed a significant improvement in decision-making and skill execution capabilities after the 22 sessions but not after the first 11 sessions. In addition, differences were found between the two game actions, given that a significant improvement was encountered in both variables of the pass action, but only in the execution variable of the dribbling action. These findings highlight the need to know which type of action is going to be trained (more tactical or technical) in order to adapt the training session methodology. It also seems that, for the teaching program to be effective, it should be applied over a longer timeline of at least 22 sessions.</div>