In a century, Earth had not faced such a pandemic disease known as Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) that has been infecting and taking numerous lives and affecting life in terms of health, social, and economic aspects. The stringency policy has been the only available mechanism to suppress the spread of the pandemic COVID-19 in the world. Accordingly, Ethiopia implied the stringency policy. Since the first case in the country at a different level of restrictiveness. This study revealed the interdependence of deterrence stringency policy and covid-19 prevalence rate in Ethiopia using Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) modelling from 14 March 2020 to 26 October 2020. The stringency index extracted from the University of Oxford COVID–19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT). The study results implied that the Stringency index was constant 80.56 from 8 April 2020 to 10 September 2020. And, average daily growth rates of total cases of the pandemic in Ethiopia were 83.33 per cent in the period of 14 March 2020 to 8 April 2020. Average daily growth rates of the total-cases of every month from March to October were 35.29%, -82.07%, 14.30%, -82.80%, -90.53%, -90.28%, -95.07%, and -95.05%, respectively, that implies a growth rate of the total number of cases was increasing monthly at decreasing rate except in March and May. In the ARDL regression, automatic lag selection optimized over 100 lag combinations and found an optimal lag order, ARDL (4,1,3). The influence of the stringency on the prevalence rate was statistically significant and negative, and the effect of the death rate on the prevalence rate was statistically significant and positive. Thus, the Ethiopian government should keep providing and executing stringency policy that would enable more to suppress the pandemic spread.