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is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint .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 national level and household level implications of individual behavior (e.g., food waste causing 3 4 5 $161 billion of losses at the national level and $1500 of losses in an average household). Further, 3 4 6 the classification tree finds that, similar to the randomly assigned information about food waste, 3 4 7 participants who were randomly assigned compostable paper plates and the participant's 3 4 8 recycling habits also work as significant determinants of Local Vulnerability. One conjecture is 3 4 9 that participants who link the implications of individual behaviors to issues of sustainability may There is a persistent group consisting of about 30% of participants who, for the entire 3 5 3 study period, including the final day, do not translate their perceived likelihood of a national 3 5 4 public health crisis into personal vulnerability from attending campus events (National, not 3 5 5 Local). These are likely a critical group in terms of modeling diffusion of COVID-19, as Poletti 3 5 6 et al. [22] emphasize the role of translating perceived risk into preventative behaviors such as However, our analysis provides few insights into the characteristics associated with 3 5 9 National, not Local group. Regression analysis finds few significant associations other than the 3 6 0 fact that older non-students are less likely to feature this response pattern and that those who spontaneously attended the study in response to same-day receipt of flyers were more likely. The former suggests that younger people in academic settings may be diagnostic for predicting 3 6 3 this response pattern while the latter may be suggestive that certain personality traits have 3 6 4 predictive power. This lack of insight into the National, not Local group is likely due to the post-hoc nature 3 6 6 of the analysis, one of several study limitations. Specifically, the study was originally designed 3 6 7 . 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.