  The implementation of social distancing policies is key to reducing the
impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, their effectiveness
ultimately depends on human behavior. In the United States, compliance with
social distancing policies has widely varied thus far during the pandemic. But
what drives such variability? Through six open datasets, including actual human
mobility, we estimated the association between mobility and the growth rate of
COVID-19 cases across 3,107 U.S. counties, generalizing previous reports. In
addition, data from the 2016 U.S. presidential election was used to measure how
the association between mobility and COVID-19 growth rate differed based on
voting patterns. A significant association between political leaning and the
COVID-19 growth rate was measured. Our results demonstrate that political
orientation may inform models predicting the impact of policies in reducing the
spread of COVID-19.

Physics and Society