The Orders Clock

How to read the clock

What “in force” means here

The clock reads each record's stated effective date and end date. An instrument counts as in force on a day when that day falls between the two, inclusive. When a record carries no end date, the clock shows it for 120 days after it took effect and then lets it drop, so an order that was quietly extended may leave the map before it left the books. Where the record names an end that is a later instrument, the later instrument carries the limitation forward under its own dates.

Only orders count. The standing statutory duties, the organizers' notices, the legal authorities and the context records (guidance and announcements) are left out of every count on this page. A State is shaded when at least one order at the State, county, city or court level carried a selected limitation type that day; the count of instruments in the summary line adds those levels together. The type table for the nation counts every level, the federal layer and the sector regulators included.

Every figure is what The COVID Project has retrieved and indexed, not a count of every order that existed. Where the map is blank, the Library holds no order of the selected types for that day; it does not say that none existed.

Read the analysis: A Nation Under Orders