Experience with Social Distancing Early in the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States: Implications for Public Health Messaging.

Our goal is to inform ongoing public health policy on the design and communication of COVID-19 social distancing measures to maximize compliance. We assessed the US publics early experience with the COVID-19 crisis during the period when shelter-in-place orders were widely implemented to understand non-compliance with those orders, sentiment about the crisis, and to compare across age categories associated with different levels of risk. We posted our survey on Twitter, Facebook, and NextDoor on March 14th to March 23rd that included 21 questions including demographics, impact on daily life, actions taken, and difficulties faced. We analyzed the free-text responses to the impact question using LIWC, a computational natural language processing tool, and performed a thematic content analysis of the reasons people gave for non-compliance with social distancing orders. Stanford Universitys IRB approved the study. In 9 days, we collected a total of 20,734 responses. 6,573 individuals provided a response (≥30 words) to the question, Tell us how the coronavirus crisis is impacting your life. Our data (Figure 1) show that younger people (18-31) are more emotionally negative, self-centered, and less concerned with family, while middle-aged people are group-oriented (32-44) and focused on family (32-64) (all