The Homa Files

The  “Covid States Project”  recently published their most recent survey of  how Americans  are (or are not) complying with the CDC’s COVID mitigation guidance (e.g. wash hands, disinfect surfaces, wear masks, socially distance)

In a prior post, we noted that  mask wearing compliance has steadily increased  to over 75%  (the light yellow diagonal  line running from the lower left to upper right corners).

But, “socially distancing” behaviors are declining … both the percentage of people avoiding contact with people outside their home (red line) and those avoiding crowded or public places (green line).

More specifically, the survey indicates:

• Education: Mask-wearing and social distancing is statistically unrelated to level of education
• Gender: Women wear masks and socially distance more than men
• Race: Proportionately fewer Whites wear masks than other racial groups; Whites and Hispanics tend to socially distance less than Blacks and Asians.

But, the differences among education levels, gender and race are relatively modest … probably within the margin of error.

There are a couple of identity characteristics that do show significant differences…

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Let’s look at age as a differentiator …

All age groups appear to track together at a high level on mask wearing:

But, there’s a big gap between youngsters (18 to 24) and all other age groups … the gap is 40 points between youngsters and old folks (over 65) and 20 points between youngsters and mid-agers.

That’s not surprising, since youngsters have been told wearing a mask will shield them from COVID infections … and even if they  don’t, the consequences won’t be very severe.

They’re just following “the science”.

This entry was posted on December 14, 2020 at 10:00 am and is filed under Coronavirus - Covid 19. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.