Childcare and transportation

Until today, our Focus-19 space has highlighted social needs that have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. But some requests have actually declined. We examined requests to 2-1-1 helplines for transportation and childcare assistance and found that both are falling. The charts below show daily requests for childcare (top chart) and transportation (bottom chart) received by 2-1-1s in 26 states between January 1 – April 8, 2020. For childcare, the drop coincides almost perfectly with the date COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, March 11 (purple line), and likely reflects the closure of schools and day cares in most communities. For transportation, the decline was more gradual and lagged two weeks after the pandemic began. This likely reflects the later dates at which stay-at-home orders were issued by state and localities. States included in the analysis were AL, AR, CT, DE, FL, HI, IA, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, NE, NJ, NV, NY, PA, SC, SD, TN, VA, WI and WY.

Contributors:  Balaji Golla, Irum Javed, Matthew Kreuter