Mask-Wearing, Social Distancing Improve, But Too Slowly, Survey Shows

Americans are being more careful to avoid catching and spreading the coronavirus but are still not being careful enough to slow the pandemic, especially with worrisome, apparently more contagious new variants looming.

That's the conclusion of the latest findings, released Friday, from the largest national survey tracking behavior during the coronavirus pandemic.

"It's good news-bad news," says David Lazer of Northeastern University, who is helping run the survey with colleagues at Harvard, Rutgers and Northwestern universities.

"The good news is we've improved a lot in terms of mask-wearing and social distancing. The bad news is, to bend the curve they really need to be much better," Lazer says.

Lazer's consortium has regularly surveyed about 20,000 people in all 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia since last spring. The latest data come from 25,640 people who were surveyed Dec. 16 and Jan. 11.

Mask-wearing reached an all-time high of about 80%, the survey found. In addition, a wide range of other behaviors also improved, since the last survey completed Dec. 1. For example, there were declines in the percentages of people saying that in the past 24 hours they went to work, the gym or a restaurant or spent time in crowded places or a room with people outside their household.

The trends are encouraging, especially because many social distancing behaviors had decreased between the spring and the fall, which likely helped fuel the surge that's currently underway, Lazer says.

But aside from mask-wearing, all the other precautionary behaviors still remain less common than they were in survey results from the spring. For instance, frequent hand-washing declined compared to spring.

"Clearly this is not enough to keep COVID-19 from spreading," Lazer says.

Others agree.

"It was a bit startling to see how many people spent time indoors with someone outside their household," Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, told NPR via email....