Covid-19 behaviour tracker
This is an old (~1 year ago) thing i posted back then on reddit and decided now to “archive” it here on my substack (original link: https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/l9l6tq/covid19_behaviour_tracker/)
As apparently these things are starting to (re)surface in MSM (2 years to late), i thought it might be worthy to bring this back here and hopefully take care of that (statistically) in the near future…
For a start, my main idea was (and is) to check how much of this behavioral nudging may correlate (causality would be harder to identify) with different NPI and their timing imposed on the population of a country… as i firmly believe they used all available tools, including that one, to frame us while testing the limits of what could have been imposed on us…
Here is a link to data for France dating back to a spring 2021 extraction (raw csv file, codebook, cleaner codebook: covidbehaviortrancker_labels, and a stata dta file): https://mega.nz/folder/SnA2EbKI#2Pf-CBOX0NAI_xuBt1k23Q
[i have also added csv files from https://yougov.co.uk/covid-19]
Other countries’ data can be found here: https://github.com/YouGov-Data/covid-19-tracker/tree/master/data but the data stops like 1 year ago…
Hence one needs to go here https://yougov.co.uk/covid-19 to get some visualizations for specific variables
Hopefully i will find courage & time to get back to this.
This is the statement from their website:
Imperial College London and YouGov have partnered to understand explore behaviours and attitudes across countries in relation to Covid-19. We do this by comparing:
- Populations respones to questions related to Covid-19 attitudes and behaviours for 29 countries, areas or territories
- Policies these 29 countries, areas or territories have implemented in response to Covid-19
- The number of Covid-19 confirmed cases, recovered cases and deatsh for these 29 countries, areas or territories
It smells behavioral science / nudging (aka manipulation) but let’s dive in
I took all European countries available over the entire time span of the data and selected a few questions out of MANY (check for yourself)
1 example of what they produce: Avoiding contact with poeple who have symptoms
Here is their main link
It is a joint collaboration between Imperial College London (Institute of Global Health Innovation & YouGov)
Their research cover 29 countries and interview 30k folks each week
This is what they write:
"It is designed to provide behavioural analysis on how different populations are responding to the pandemic, helping public health bodies in their efforts to limit the impact of the disease. Anonymised respondent level data will be available for all public health and academic institutions globally. "
It stinks behavioral science / nudging / crowd control / Milgrom experiment / whatever, imho
The list of questions is huge and quite invasive (see links) or directly here (csv file): https://github.com/YouGov-Data/covid-19-tracker/blob/master/codebook.xlsx
On the first link above you can access their dashboards directly so you can visualize outcomes of the surveys
On their github you can access raw data: https://github.com/YouGov-Data/covid-19-tracker
Just wanted to post it here fyi
If some data/stata nerds want to play with the data but mostly so you folks can check their dashboard to see what kind of questions are asked and what kind of results are provided
If i remember well, some (if not many?) members of the SAGE for instance in UK are behavioral scientists
And there were information regarding how it was needed (and actually done) to "frame" populations so they accept NPI, notably lockdowns
I think it is worthy of a deeper investigation
Also use these survey data in other covid-19 metrics analyses (like "tests", "cases", hospi., icu, deaths) and ultimately lockdowns
Cheers