Who’s social distancing? UC Davis study shows income levels, stay-at-home orders are factors
How much are Americans staying home or maintaining social distancing? It depends heavily on income, a new UC Davis study suggests.
Published Thursday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found that wealthier communities decreased their mobility “significantly more” than poorer communities. Those findings stem from anonymized data from mobile device location pings from across the United States captured between January and April 2020.
The study found that while there was substantial social distancing after the stay-at-home orders were issued, it “dramatically increases in intensity with income.”
By mid-March, there was about a 25-percentage-point jump of the wealthiest communities staying completely at home, compared to a 10 percentage point increase in staying at home in the poorest ones, the study found.
“We found that before the pandemic, individuals in the wealthiest neighborhoods tended to be the least likely to stay completely at home on a given day,” lead researcher and graduate student Joakim Weill said in a university news release.
“But when the states of emergency came into play, individuals living in the wealthiest areas stayed home the most. It was a complete reversal,” he continued.
The study does not determine the causes for this reversal. But economic and health experts have pointed out that essential, but often low-wage, workers such as store clerks and farm laborers have had fewer options to quarantine or work from home.
State and local officials have also acknowledged they have struggled to reach the many Californians with practical educational messaging and testing. That’s particularly worrying given the disease’s disproportionate effect on Black, Latino and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders, who have died from COVID-19 complications at a higher rate compared to the state population.
The study reveals “a double burden of COVID-19” — lower-income communities are more vulnerable to economic and health impacts of the virus, and “they also exhibit less of the social distancing that could buffer against it.
This story was originally published July 30, 2020 at 11:42 AM.