How the record was built and checked

What the Library holds

The Library indexes the governmental orders and related instruments that limited commerce, travel and group meetings in the United States between March 2020 and September 30, 2021, organized by issuer. Its collections are the federal layer (proclamations and executive orders; the CDC, TSA, OSHA, CMS, HHS, FEMA, DHS, OMB and housing-agency instruments; the federal courts' general orders); the fifty States and the District, from the first declarations to the instrument that ended general restrictions and the preemption of local orders; forty metropolitan areas; the regulators of twenty-seven industries and the organizers' notices of the group meetings, trade shows, fairs and seasons each industry lost; the interconnected-economy instruments (supply chain and borders; the workforce; travel, courts and public offices); twenty-six clusters of authorities that are easy to overlook, from the Coast Guard and the ports to the State licensing boards, alcohol and gaming regulators, courts, motor-vehicle offices, tribal nations and territories; the standing duties of every State and of the United States; the legal authorities; and the public court filings the Government's-own-words page quotes. Foreign governments' orders are held as facts and circumstances only and are never described as orders under the statute.

How each instrument was retrieved

Every exhibit was retrieved by the same method. The compiler first requested the instrument from the issuing authority's live site. Where the live copy was gone or altered, the compiler took the Internet Archive's raw capture nearest the instrument's date. Where no raw capture existed, the compiler rendered the archived page to a PDF. Whichever route succeeded, the result was kept only if its text contained a distinctive phrase from the instrument itself; a file that did not contain the phrase was refused, and the retrieval was recorded as failed. The retrieval method, the archive snapshot timestamp where one was used, the file size and the SHA-256 hash of the file were written into the instrument's record at the moment of retrieval.

What each record carries

Each record carries the exhibit identifier; the level of government; the jurisdiction and the issuer; the authority the instrument recites for itself; the instrument's number and title; the dates issued, effective and ended, with the instrument that ended it; the calendar quarters in which it was in force; the limitation types; the addressees; the operative clause verbatim; the enforcement provision (the penalty, license or participation sanction the instrument or its statute recites); the functions of a business it reached; the source URL; the retrieval method; the file, its hash and its grade; and notes recording every later correction with its date. The operative clause and the enforcement provision are the answer to any suggestion that an instrument was guidance: each records the words that command and the sanction that enforces. An instrument is described as in force in a quarter only if its effective date fell on or before the quarter's last day and its end date, if any, fell on or after the quarter's first day.

Grades

Every record carries one of four grades, and the site shows only the first two. Primary source read (verified_primary) means the compiler read the issuing authority's own text: the order as published, the register page, the codified rule, the court's docket entry. Confirmed from a secondary source (verified_secondary) means the instrument's existence, number, date and substance were established from an identifiable secondary source (the authority's own press release, a State health-policy tracker, a governors' association tracker, an order archive, press reports of the time) and the primary text was not read. The two grades the site never shows are unverified, meaning recollection or a search result only, or a saved file whose content could not be machine-read, and not retrieved, meaning a retrieval that failed. An instrument in either of those classes is never named on this site. Where a compiler qualified a grade in words, the record is graded by its leading term and the qualification is kept in the notes.

How the record was checked

A second reviewer, independent of the compiler of each collection, checked every record file, verified the hash of every exhibit file against the recorded value, read a sample of exhibits against their own text, tested each record's quarters in force against its dates, and verified every pin to the litigation record and to the Notice against the page cited. The reviewers reclassified 615 records in the agency collections that were guidance, bulletins or announcements rather than binding instruments; those records are shown as "Context (guidance or announcement)," are never described as orders, and are excluded from every count of orders in force. In the standing-duties collection the reviewer checked every characterization against a single rule: a "should" is a recommendation until an instrument makes it compulsory. Court decisions are recorded as adjudications, attorneys general's opinions as interpretations, and bills that were never enacted are recorded as such and are never cited as the source of any duty. Every correction was applied to the record with a dated note, and every exhibit identifier cited in an analysis on this site was checked against the index before publication.

Exhibit identifiers and file names

Every instrument has one identifier, used everywhere on this site. A State instrument carries its two-letter State code and a serial number (Ex. TX-004 is Texas Executive Order GA-09 of March 22, 2020); a metropolitan instrument carries MET and the metro code (Ex. MET-NYC-017 is New York City Emergency Executive Order No. 225 of August 16, 2021); a federal instrument carries FED (Ex. FED-020 is the CDC conveyance mask order); a sector regulator's instrument carries SEC and the industry number, and an organizer's notice adds GM; an interconnected-economy instrument carries ECO; an overlooked authority carries AGY and its cluster; a standing duty carries DUT and the State code (Ex. DUT-TX-001 is Texas Health and Safety Code section 81.002) or DUT-FED (Ex. DUT-FED-001 is the general duty clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act); a legal authority carries LAW; a public court filing or Service document carries GOV; a foreign instrument carries FOR. Each exhibit file is named by its identifier, a short slug of the instrument and the instrument's issue date; where a file-name date differs from the record's date, the record governs. A small number of exhibits are scanned images without a text layer, read by rendering and noted as such.

The exhibit identifier scheme

An identifier names the layer of the Library an instrument came from, then a serial number. The layer prefix is what you see first in a citation such as (Ex. TX-004), and the same identifier opens the record at /library/TX-004 and the exhibit file at /exhibit/TX-004. Serial numbers may carry a lower-case suffix where a later instrument was filed beside an earlier one.

Counts are records indexed by The COVID Project under each prefix, not a count of every order that existed. An example is linked only where that record is published.

The index

A master index holds one row per record with the identifier, level, jurisdiction, issuer, instrument, title, dates, quarters in force, limitation types, grade, retrieval method, file, whether the file is present and its hash matches, source URL and archive snapshot. The index compiler reads every record file, resolves each record's exhibit file, verifies hashes, treats a later file that cites another file's identifier as a cross-reference rather than a duplicate, and logs every unresolved problem. The site's data is built from that index and the record files; the builder drops every record whose grade does not begin with "verified" and every record that is not a public governmental instrument, a published organizer's notice, a published legal authority or a public court filing. The counts on the home page are counts of instruments indexed by The COVID Project, never a count of all orders that existed.

What the Library does not do

It never describes a bare declaration of emergency as an order; declarations are shown as predicates, and a proclamation that carries an operative limiting clause is described as the order it is. It never describes an agency's announcement, bulletin or guidance as an order; such a document is cited as the record of the order it implemented. It never describes an instrument that post-dates September 30, 2021 as a third-quarter 2021 order. It never counts an instrument twice: an interconnected-economy copy of a federal instrument is cross-linked to the federal identifier and cited once. It never names an instrument it could not verify. And it never claims that its counts measure the orders that existed; the public datasets on the Story page place those in the tens of thousands, and every figure here is a floor.

Corrections

An error in a record, a date, a quotation or a grade can be reported through the contact page with the exhibit identifier. Each report is checked against the instrument's own text, and a corrected record carries a dated note of the change.