Covid-19 and urban exodus: did urban dwellers contaminate rural dwellers?

This paper estimates the causal effect of the large urban exodus that occurred
prior to the lockdown measures implemented to prevent the Covid-19 epidemic,
using the quasi-natural experiment of the French case. On March 14, 2020, the
French government announced that all non-essential public spaces would be closed
from March 17. As a result, millions of French urban dwellers anticipated the
lockdown and decided to flee the major cities for the duration of the lockdown (urban
exodus). In this paper, I am interested in the causal impact of this phenomenon
on the spread of Covid-19, i.e. whether this urban exodus led to an increase in
Covid-19 cases. I estimate that this urban exodus led to an increase in the number
of hospitalizations between 1,850 (lowest estimates) and 13,500 (highest estimates),
which corresponds to 1.65% and 12% of the cumulated hospitalizations for the period
respectively.