Perceived vulnerability to COVID-19 infection from event attendance: Results from Louisiana, USA, two weeks preceding the national emergency declaration

Ran Li; Bingchen Yang; Jerrod Penn; Bailey Houghtaling; Juan Chen; Witoon Prinyawiwatkul; Brian Roe; Danyi Qi

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.01.20049742 doi: medRxiv preprint plot in Figure 2 is that Local Vulnerability persistently lags National Likelihood, and does not 3 2 2 significantly exceed the 50% mark until the last day of the study, which is the first day after the 3 2 3 state of Louisiana had declared a public health emergency, but before LSU had cancelled classes 3 2 4 or campus events. those identifying with races other than white and black are more likely to express Local 3 2 9 Vulnerability, while those in the highest income category expressed lower Local Vulnerability significantly higher risk from aggressive driving tactics than did younger drivers, while Lo [27] 3 3 3 found that higher income respondents expressed less concern about environmental risks, which 3 3 4 he hypothesized to stem from a heightened sense of material risk faced by those with lower 3 3 5 incomes. Flynn, Slovic and Mertz [28] found respondents identifying as white, particularly 3 3 6 white men, registered significantly lower environmental risk perceptions, hypothesizing that 3 3 7 socio-political factors including power and status may influence risk perceptions. Other characteristics typically identified in the literature (e.g., sex) are not significantly 3 3 9 associated with expressed Local Vulnerability. Interestingly, participants randomly assigned an we cannot provide a definitive explanation of this relationship given post-hoc design constraints, 3 4 3 we note the food waste information treatment was the only information treatment to emphasize 3 4 4 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.