Abstract Wearing masks reduces the spread of COVID-19, but compliance with mask mandates varies across individuals, time, and space. Accurate and continuous measures of mask wearing, as well as other health-related behaviors, are important for public health policies. This article presents a novel approach to estimate mask wearing using geotagged Twitter image data from March through September, 2020 in the United States. We validate our measure using public opinion survey data and extend the analysis to investigate county-level differences in mask wearing. We find a strong association between mask mandates and mask wearing—an average increase of 20%. Moreover, this association is greatest in Republican-leaning counties. The findings have important implications for understanding how governmental policies shape and monitor citizen responses to public health crises.
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Estimation of mask effectiveness perception for small domains using multiple data sources
Abstract Understanding the impacts of pandemics on public health and related societal issues at granular levels is of great interest. COVID-19 is affecting everyone in the globe and mask wearing is one of the few precautions against it. To quantify people’s perception of mask effectiveness and to prevent the spread of COVID-19 for small areas, we use Understanding America Study’s (UAS) survey data on COVID-19 as our primary data source. Our data analysis shows that direct survey-weighted estimates for small areas could be highly unreliable. In this paper, we develop a synthetic estimation method to estimate proportions of perceived mask effectiveness for small areas using a logistic model that combines information from multiple data sources. We select our working model using an extensive data analysis facilitated by a new variable selection criterion for survey data and benchmarking ratios. We suggest a jackknife method to estimate the variance of our estimator. From our data analysis, it is evident that our proposed synthetic method outperforms the direct survey-weighted estimator with respect to commonly used evaluation measures.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1758808
- PAR ID:
- 10396298
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Statistics in Transition New Series
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2450-0291
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 20
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The COVID-19 pandemic severely affected many aspects of human life. While most health agencies agree mask wearing and physical distancing reduce viral transmission, efforts to improve the assessment of these behaviors are lacking. This study aimed to develop a direct observation video method [Viral Transmission (VT)-Scan] for assessing COVID-19 transmission behaviors and related factors (e.g., environmental setting). A wearable video device (WVD) was used to obtain videos of outdoor, public areas. The videos were examined to extract relevant information. All outcomes displayed good to excellent intra- and inter-reliability with intra-class correlation coefficients ranging from 0.836 to 0.997. The majority of people had a mask (60.8%) but 22.1% of them wore it improperly, 45.4% were not physical distancing, and 27.6% were simultaneously mask and physical distancing non-compliant. Transmission behaviors varied by demographics with white, obese males least likely to be mask-compliant and white, obese females least likely to physical distance. Certain environments (e.g., crosswalks) were identified as “hot spots” where higher rates of adverse transmission behaviors occurred. This study introduces a reliable method for obtaining objective data on COVID-19 transmission behaviors and related factors which may be useful for agent-based modeling and policy formation.more » « less
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