How Successful is a Lockdown During a Pandemic?

Social distancing, leading to lockdown, has been followed as a measure to restrict the spread of COVID-19 infection in almost every country. In this paper, we study the impact of the United States of America's lockdown measures during this pandemic in restricting the spread of infection. We have split the lockdown into two types - hard lockdown and soft lockdown. A hard lockdown is defined as the period when only essential services are provided. On the other hand, in the soft lockdown period, non-essential services are allowed, but with prevailing social distancing measures. Our findings suggest that a properly implemented Hard Lockdown followed by a soft Lockdown is indeed effective in reducing the reproduction number (R
₀
). Although R
₀
increases during the soft lockdown, the rate of increase is restricted if the hard lockdown was implemented favorably. As exceptions to this general trend, we have observed that in Washington state Hard Lockdown has failed to reduce R
₀
, and Vermont's soft lockdown implementation was successful in controlling the increase in R
₀
post-Hard Lockdown.