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Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S.

Social distancing prescribed by policy makers in response to COVID-19 raises important questions as to how effectively people of color can distance. Due to inequalities from residential segregation, Hispanic and Black populations have challenges in meeting health expectations. However, segregated ne...

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Autor principal: Gibbons, Joseph
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8153499/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34038459
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251960
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author Gibbons, Joseph
author_facet Gibbons, Joseph
author_sort Gibbons, Joseph
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description Social distancing prescribed by policy makers in response to COVID-19 raises important questions as to how effectively people of color can distance. Due to inequalities from residential segregation, Hispanic and Black populations have challenges in meeting health expectations. However, segregated neighborhoods also support the formation of social bonds that relate to healthy behaviors. We evaluate the question of non-White distancing using social mobility data from Google on three sites: workplaces, grocery stores, and recreational locations. Employing hierarchical linear modeling and geographically weighted regression, we find the relation of race/ethnicity to COVID-19 distancing is varied across the United States. The HLM models show that compared to Black populations, Hispanic populations overall more effectively distance from recreation sites and grocery stores: each point increase in percent Hispanic was related to residents being 0.092 percent less likely (p< 0.05) to visit recreational sites and 0.127 percent less likely (p< 0.01) to visit grocery stores since the onset of COVID-19. However, the GWR models show there are places where the percent Black is locally related to recreation distancing while percent Hispanic is not. Further, these models show the association of percent Black to recreation and grocery distancing can be locally as strong as 1.057 percent (p< 0.05) and 0.989 percent (p< 0.05), respectively. Next, the HLM models identified that Black/White residential isolation was related to less distancing, with each point of isolation residents were 11.476 percent more likely (p< 0.01) to go to recreational sites and 7.493 percent more likely (p< 0.05) to visit grocery stores compared to before COVID-19. These models did not find a measurable advantage/disadvantage for Black populations in these places compared to White populations. COVID-19 policy should not assume disadvantage in achieving social distancing accrue equally to different racial/ethnic minorities.
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spelling pubmed-81534992021-06-09 Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S. Gibbons, Joseph PLoS One Research Article Social distancing prescribed by policy makers in response to COVID-19 raises important questions as to how effectively people of color can distance. Due to inequalities from residential segregation, Hispanic and Black populations have challenges in meeting health expectations. However, segregated neighborhoods also support the formation of social bonds that relate to healthy behaviors. We evaluate the question of non-White distancing using social mobility data from Google on three sites: workplaces, grocery stores, and recreational locations. Employing hierarchical linear modeling and geographically weighted regression, we find the relation of race/ethnicity to COVID-19 distancing is varied across the United States. The HLM models show that compared to Black populations, Hispanic populations overall more effectively distance from recreation sites and grocery stores: each point increase in percent Hispanic was related to residents being 0.092 percent less likely (p< 0.05) to visit recreational sites and 0.127 percent less likely (p< 0.01) to visit grocery stores since the onset of COVID-19. However, the GWR models show there are places where the percent Black is locally related to recreation distancing while percent Hispanic is not. Further, these models show the association of percent Black to recreation and grocery distancing can be locally as strong as 1.057 percent (p< 0.05) and 0.989 percent (p< 0.05), respectively. Next, the HLM models identified that Black/White residential isolation was related to less distancing, with each point of isolation residents were 11.476 percent more likely (p< 0.01) to go to recreational sites and 7.493 percent more likely (p< 0.05) to visit grocery stores compared to before COVID-19. These models did not find a measurable advantage/disadvantage for Black populations in these places compared to White populations. COVID-19 policy should not assume disadvantage in achieving social distancing accrue equally to different racial/ethnic minorities. Public Library of Science 2021-05-26 /pmc/articles/PMC8153499/ /pubmed/34038459 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251960 Text en © 2021 Joseph Gibbons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Gibbons, Joseph
Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S.
title Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S.
title_full Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S.
title_fullStr Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S.
title_full_unstemmed Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S.
title_short Distancing the socially distanced: Racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to COVID-19 in the U.S.
title_sort distancing the socially distanced: racial/ethnic composition’s association with physical distancing in response to covid-19 in the u.s.
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8153499/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34038459
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251960
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