ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2025
Characterizing population-level changes in human behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- The paradox of neglecting changes in behavior: How standard epidemic models misestimate both transmissibility and final epidemic size.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Partisan differences in health behaviors can impact respiratory disease dynamics.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The transmission of communicable diseases in human populations is known to be modulated by behavioral patterns. However, detailed characterizations of how population-level behaviors change over time during multiple disease outbreaks and spatial resolutions are still not widely available. We used data from 431,211 survey responses collected in the United States, between April 2020 and June 2022, to provide a description of how human behaviors fluctuated during the first 2 y of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis suggests that at the national and state levels, people's adherence to recommendations to avoid contact with others (a preventive behavior) was highest early in the pandemic but gradually-and linearly-decreased over time. Importantly, during periods of intense COVID-19 mortality, adaption to preventive behaviors increased-despite the overall temporal decrease. These spatial-temporal characterizations help improve our understanding of the bidirectional feedback loop between outbreak severity and human behavior. Our findings should benefit both computational modeling teams developing methodologies to predict the dynamics of future epidemics and policymakers designing strategies to mitigate the effects of future disease outbreaks.
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