Social cohesion, normally associated with positive outcomes in physical and mental health, can be a liability during a pandemic, according to new research by the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Washington.
That’s because social connections — which generally ensure access to support, information and resources — can also provide pathways to infection, especially for vulnerable individuals.
The study, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, points to a hidden driver of disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among marginalized communities living in densely populated urban areas.
“With this study, we wanted to better understand factors that led to differences in who became infected early on in the pandemic,” says lead author Loring Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UC Irvine. “Our computational models found that communities whose members belonged to groups that were, on average, slightly more cohesive, experienced a much higher infection hazard, especially before non-pharmaceutical interventions like masking were widespread.”
The researchers focused on San Francisco, combining demographic and housing data from the U.S. Census with observed infection cases among Black, Latinx, Asian and white racial and ethnic groups. They then used computational modelling to understand 1,225 trajectories — or pandemic histories — of individual infections that occurred before March 24, 2020.
“This paper shows the power of computational models to further our understanding on how small racial/ethnic disparities can result in large real-world outcomes such as what we have seen in this pandemic’s timing and exposure to COVID-19,” said co-author Zack Almquist, an assistant professor of sociology at the UW.