The COVID States Project #26: Trajectory of COVID-19-related behaviors

• Main Authors: Lazer, David, Santillana, Mauricio, Perlis, Roy H., Quintana, Alexi, Ognyanova, Katherine, Green, Jon, Baum, Matthew, Simonson, Matthew, Uslu, Ata, Chwe, Hanyu, Druckman, James, Lin, Jennifer, Gitomer, Adina
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Center for Open Science 2021
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/37jbe

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. We address four primary questions:1) What are the national trends in social distancing behaviors and mask wearing since April?2) What are the trends among particular population subsets?3) What are the trends across individual states plus DC?4) What is the relationship, at the state level, between social distancing behaviors and mask wearing with the current prevalence of COVID-19?