Pro-Trump areas physically distanced less than pro-Clinton areas during the COVID-19 pandemic, new study finds

Newswise — NYU and Yale scientists found that this spring people in counties that voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election tended to physically distance less than those in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton.

This study, which appears this morning in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, used an innovative method: GPS location data from approximately 3,000 U.S. counties and 15 million GPS smart-phone coordinates between March 9 and May 29. The dataset has been used by others for previously published studies on this topic.

Notably, the researchers in the Nature Human Behaviour study found that partisan differences in distancing were associated with subsequent higher COVID-19 infection growth rates in pro-Trump regions. 

While the authors caution that their results do not show that partisanship in the U.S. caused different physical distancing patterns, they conclude that partisanship might be an important risk factor for the current COVID-19 pandemic--and potentially other public health crises.