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Regardless of political affiliation, Americans took greater precautions during the height of the pandemic to avoid getting sick when COVID hospitalizations and deaths spiked, a comprehensive national survey conducted by Northeastern University researchers has found.

After analyzing more than 430,000 survey responses solicited between April 2020 and June 2022, researchers with Northeastern's Civic Health and Institutions Project found that when presented with news about heightened risk of illness or death, people of different political leanings reported avoiding contact with others and taking other steps to avoid the virus.

The findings, says principal investigator Mauricio Santillana Guzman, a professor of physics and director of Northeastern's Machine Intelligence Group for the Betterment of Health and the Environment, contradict the perception that more conservative Americans were not being as careful as their more liberal counterparts.

"What we expected to see was that certain groups of people with some political leaning would behave differently because that is what we were reading in the news," says Santillana. "We realized that independent of which party you were listening to, when there were a lot of COVID cases and specifically COVID deaths, everyone was being more careful."

The connection was almost immediate, he says. When high numbers of COVID-related deaths were reported, respondents increased risk-avoiding behavior—specifically by avoiding contact with others. Delaware respondents were the most in sync with national death rates.

The research is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers wanted to know how people were responding to recommendations from public health officials during the first two years of the COVID pandemic. The survey asked detailed questions about household health, activity levels and perceptions about how the virus was being handled.

The survey addressed 15 different types of behavior, Santillana says. Granular questions asked about the number of interactions both in-person and virtually, as well as about behaviors like handwashing, masking and avoiding contact with other people.

When the news reported high numbers of COVID-related deaths, Santillana says, respondents reported behaving more carefully, "no matter what party."

Overall, he notes, Democrats followed recommendations at higher levels than Republicans and even when Republicans increased their precautions, they didn't do so at the same level as Democrats.

When vaccines became available, Democratic-leaning states stopped following risk-avoiding protocols at a slightly higher rate than Republican states, Santillana says. But similarly, he notes, the percentage of people wearing masks and social distancing in Democratic-leaning states was typically higher to begin with.

Respondents in California and New Jersey, for example, started out taking greater precautions, while Utah and Missouri were less cautious from the beginning of the pandemic. But people became more social over time. Visiting friends, for example, rose from about 8% of people in April of 2020 to 28% by May of 2022.

The findings can help inform public health messaging for future disease outbreaks, says Santillana.

"This gave us a sense that people were listening and not fully ignoring [public health guidelines]," he says. "There was discourse from certain regions that they didn't believe in COVID. But we started noticing that, in fact, people were paying attention."