COVID-19 and Income Profile: How People in Different Income Groups Responded to Disease Outbreak, Case Study of the United States

Sun, Qianqian; Zhou, Weiyi; Kabiri, Aliakbar; Darzi, Aref; Hu, Songhua; Younes, Hannah; Zhang, Lei

Due to immature treatment and rapid transmission of COVID-19, mobility interventions play a crucial role in containing the outbreak. Among various non-pharmacological interventions, community infection control is considered to be a quite promising approach. However, there is a lack of research on improving community-level interventions based on a community's real conditions and characteristics using real-world observations. Our paper aims to investigate the different responses to mobility interventions between communities in the United States with a specific focus on different income levels. We produced six daily mobility metrics for all communities using the mobility location data from over 100 million anonymous devices on a monthly basis. Each metric is tabulated by three performance indicators:"best performance,""effort,"and"consistency."We found that being high-income improves social distancing behavior after controlling multiple confounding variables in each of the eighteen scenarios. In addition to the reality that it is more difficult for low-income communities to comply with social distancing, the comparisons between scenarios raise concerns on the employment status, working condition, accessibility to life supplies, and exposure to the virus of low-income communities.