“Shelter at Home, if You Can:” Community Vulnerability and Residential Sequestering During the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines the effects of community vulnerability on residential sequestering across counties in the United States. Powerlessness and racialized politics are two hypothesized reasons for why community vulnerability affects social distancing behavior. Powerlessness is tied to the socioeconomic disadvantages of places, which intertwines with politics and race to produce a stratified response to the pandemic. We examine these dynamics with analyses that account for the disease epidemiology and other demographic factors. Data come from multiple sources, including Google’s Mobility Reports and Cuebiq’s Mobility Insights. Growth curve analyses find that socioeconomic disadvantage, political orientation, and racial composition independently explain the rate of change in mobility and peak residential sequestering levels during the initial outbreak. These conceptually separate dimensions of community vulnerability operate in concert, rather than as substitutes or as competing explanations, to impact the behavioral response to COVID-19.