Four LSU professors teamed up to study the demographic implications of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic and what role government mandates played in people’s decisions to stay home. 

Their paper, titled “Demographic, Jurisdictional, and Spatial Effects on Social Distancing in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” observed six factors: income, education, race, children, household income and population density.  

The team acquired cell phone ping data through a company called SafeGraph using an academic license. From this they were able to determine areas of high or low social distancing around the country. 

“Social distancing may arise naturally if individuals prefer staying at home to avoid infection and have the capacity to stay at home,” the paper reads. “Or it can arise by governmental fiat as a non-pharmaceutical intervention to curb the spread of the disease through restrictions on individual activities over a jurisdiction.”

The researchers believe that towards the beginning of the pandemic, much of the social distancing that took place could be attributed to voluntary behavior. At that point, there were no government mandates requiring citizens to isolate. 

“As the pandemic progressed, we saw that voluntary social distancing and jurisdictional [mandates] were reinforcing each other,” Department of Finance professor Rajesh Narayanan said.  

The research also suggested that government mandates don’t necessarily have a large impact on a person’s decision to isolate or not. If someone was not willing to social distance beforehand, it is unlikely that a jurisdictional requirement changed that.  

“It’s fairly obvious that if you don’t want to [social distance], you can largely avoid it,” finance professor R. Kelley Pace said.  

Department of finance assistant professor James Nordlund affirmed this concept as well. “As the mandates come in, the type of people who were more likely to have voluntarily social distanced are also more responsive to these policies.” 

There was, however, a sizable increase in social distancing after President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, as that action likely cemented the idea in people’s minds that the virus was truly a threat to America, Nordlund said.

“We see a huge increase in distancing after the president’s declaration of a national emergency, and that could be partially a behavioral response,” Nordlund said. “It could be more salient in people’s minds that this truly is a threat because there was a lot of questioning about that from some groups in the beginning.” 

Nordlund said behavioral responses to social distancing can be broken down into three main groups: the people who are willing to distance, the people who cannot distance and the people who will not distance.  

The demographic data showed that income and education, which are intrinsically correlated, were the clearest distinguishing factors on whether a household would social distance or not. Areas of lower income had lower levels of distancing, while areas of higher income had the highest levels of distancing.  

“Higher income jobs more often will have the capacity to perform much of that work in a remote environment,” Nordlund explained. 

The research also showed that neighboring communities had similar responses to the virus. If one county or parish had high levels of distancing, it is likely that the surrounding regions had similar levels. The same was observed for low levels of distancing. It is unclear what factor caused this occurrence. 

Nordlund said that should another event like COVID-19 occur, the government could improve citizen’s responses to social distancing by “targeting people’s willingness to stay at home through a coordinated government effort.” 

He said local governments should “encourage” people to recognize the value of flattening the curve and accepting personal limitations on what they may be used to so that the people who cannot social distance or who may have to be working can do so as safely as possible.