Evidence-based COVID-19 Response in Ethiopia: A quasi-Experimental Study on Social Distancing

Public transport and attending social events are becoming a stumbling block to maintain a safe social distancing in the fight against COVID-19. We developed a quasi-experiment that involves a tradeoff between economic outcomes over social distancing in some natural settings. The results show that about 58% of subjects prefer to break the social distancing rule and choose the most unsafe public transport. As a result, we further tried to understand the determinant factors of practicing social distancing using a binary probit model. The results show that a relatively lower income, and lower education level are significant and positively influence the decision to practice the social distancing rule which is contrary to the existed literature. The second experiment was devoted to understanding the effect of framing media message on subject’s decision to take part in a social event. The results show that there is no statistically significant difference in decisions between the treatment (those who received a loss framed message) and control (those who received the gain COVD related media message) groups. However, we find a strong association between social participation and decision to take part in social events.