Pandemic Politics: Timing State-Level Social Distancing Responses to COVID-19

Christopher Adolph; Kenya Amano; Bree Bang-Jensen; Nancy Fullman; John Wilkerson

In addition to these covariates, we explored a variety of alternative explanatory factors. These included the count of COVID-19 deaths within the state,(23) the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in neighboring states, Fox News viewers as a percentage of the population,(27) the spread of social distancing policies among the states from which each state typically borrows policies,(28) the percentage of state employment dependent on tourism,(29) the percentage of state residents who were at least 70 years of age,(30) the percentage of school children receiving reduced price lunches, (31) and the percentage of state residents with a college degree.(32) None of these variables had substantively and statistically significant relationships with social distancing measures when added to our baseline model, nor did they substantially alter the results of the baseline model. is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to (which was not peer-reviewed) preprint Table 1 for additonal model details.