The current state of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is dire, with circumstances in the Upper Midwest particularly grim. In contrast, multiple countries around the world have shown that temporary changes in human behavior and consistent precautions, such as effective testing, contact tracing, and isolation, can slow transmission of COVID-19, allowing local economies to remain open and societal activities to approach normalcy as of today. These include island countries such as New Zealand, Taiwan, Iceland and Australia, and continental countries such as Norway, Uruguay, Thailand, Finland, and South Korea. These successes demonstrate that coordinated action to change behavior can control the pandemic. In this report, we evaluate how the human behaviors that have been shown to inhibit the spread of COVID-19 have evolved across the US since April, 2020.
Our report is based on surveys that the COVID States Project has been conducting approximately every month since April in all 50 US states plus the District of Columbia. …
Overall, we find that social distancing has decreased dramatically since the spring, while mask wearing has increased. These trends are consistent across all states. Generally, the subpopulations with higher levels of social distancing were women, Asian Americans and African Americans, older, more educated, and Democratic. Partisan gaps in behavior are very large and have increased — especially for social distancing — over the past 6 months. Finally, the states that have had the lowest levels of social distancing behavior and mask wearing are currently suffering the worst outbreaks. CONTINUED — pdf
COVID States Project
