County-level mobility and sociopolitical context in the spread of COVID-19 during spring 2020

The implementation of social distancing policies is key to reduce the spread of the recent COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics. However, their effectiveness ultimately depends on human behavior. For example, in the United States, compliance with social distancing policies widely varied in Spring 2020. What factors were associated with the observed variability in behavioral compliance with the policies? Utilizing detailed county-level data, we estimate the association between human mobility and the growth rate of COVID-19 cases across approximately 3,100 U.S. counties from January 1, 2020 to June 20, 2020. In addition, using data from U.S. presidential elections we measured how the association between mobility and COVID-19 growth rate varied as a function of county voting pattern. Our results generalize previous reports in finding a significant association between political leaning and the COVID-19 growth rate. These results highlight how it might be beneficial to consider political orientation when building models of the multivariate relationships between the spread of pandemics and public health policies intended to curb the expansion of the pandemic.