Submitted by Stephen Dunne on July 16, 2020 - 1:26pm
Prof. Christopher Adolph and graduate student Bree Bang-Jensen made a video presentation on “Pandemic Politics: Understanding State-Level Social Distancing Responses to COVID-19.” The video can be viewed here.
Prof. Christopher Adolph and graduate student Bree Bang-Jensen presented joint work with Prof. John Wilkerson and graduate students Kenya Amano, Nancy Fullman (Global Health Metrics), Beatrice Magistro, Christianna Parr, and Grace Reinke as part of a Population Health Colloquium sponsored by the College of Health at Lehigh University.
Adolph and team are tracking the timing of social distancing mandates across the 50 states in response to the novel coronavirus. They find that the partisanship of governors and citizens is by far the most powerful factor influencing both when these mandates were imposed and how quickly they were eased. Republican governors and states that voted for Trump in 2016 were the slowest to act at the start of the crisis and the quickest to relax, regardless of the rate of spread of COVID-19. The same pattern appears to be emerging for public mask mandates.
The team’s ongoing efforts to catalog state social distancing policy can be found here.