Weather and Lockdown Compliance

The effectiveness of containment measures depends on both epidemiological and sociological mechanisms, most notably compliance with national lockdown rules. Yet, there is growing discontent with social distancing rules in many countries, which is expected to intensify further during summer. Using a highly granular dataset on compliance of over 105,000 individuals in the United Kingdom (UK), we find that compliance with lockdown policies tends to be high in the overall population, but that specific segments of society are substantially less compliant. Our findings show that warmer temperatures decrease non-compliance with governmental guidelines of individuals who are male, divorced, part-time employed, and/or parent of more than two children. Thus, as long as heard immunity through vaccination is not achieved and new strains demand containment measures to remain in place, understanding the individual determinants of non-compliance behaviour in different seasons of the year will remain important for policymakers to design effective policies in the future.