The spread of COVID-19 increases with individual mobility and depends on political leaning

TL;DR

This study analyzes how individual mobility and political leaning influence COVID-19 spread in U.S. counties, revealing that political orientation significantly affects the relationship between mobility and infection growth rates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis linking political leaning to mobility's impact on COVID-19 spread, using extensive datasets across U.S. counties.

Findings

Mobility correlates with COVID-19 growth rate.

Political leaning modifies the mobility-infection relationship.

Partisan voting patterns influence pandemic dynamics.

Abstract

The implementation of social distancing policies is key to reducing the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, their effectiveness ultimately depends on human behavior. In the United States, compliance with social distancing policies has widely varied thus far during the pandemic. But what drives such variability? Through six open datasets, including actual human mobility, we estimated the association between mobility and the growth rate of COVID-19 cases across 3,107 U.S. counties, generalizing previous reports. In addition, data from the 2016 U.S. presidential election was used to measure how the association between mobility and COVID-19 growth rate differed based on voting patterns. A significant association between political leaning and the COVID-19 growth rate was measured. Our results demonstrate that political orientation may inform models predicting the impact of policies in reducing the spread of COVID-19.