  This paper investigates the effect of the novel coronavirus and crude oil
prices on the United States (US) economic policy uncertainty (EPU). Using daily
data for the period January 21-March 13, 2020, our Autoregressive Distributed
Lag (ARDL) model shows that the new infection cases reported at global level,
and the death ratio, have no significant effect on the US EPU, whereas the oil
price negative dynamics leads to increased uncertainty. However, analyzing the
situation outside China, we discover that both new case announcements and the
COVID-19 associated death ratio have a positive influence on the US EPU.
