Rural residents in top 25 markets were more likely to follow pandemic precautions when lockdown hit, study says

Rural residents who watched television news from stations in the top 25 TV markets last year were more likely to follow precautions against catching the coronavirus, a study found.

“For some rural residents, their local news often focuses on urban communities with issues quite different from their own,” wrote Eunji Kim, Michael Shepherd and Joshua Clinton in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To measure viewers' compliance with recommended precautions, they studied mobility data from Cuebiq in 771 rural counties in the first week of April 2020, when American were advised to stay home. They also surveyed 9,081 residents from 705 of the counties about their efforts to social distance, their media consumption, and their concerns about Covid-19.

They found that rural residents who watched local news from a top-25 market were more likely to social distance than those outside of a top-100 market. Rural residents in top-25 markets were also more likely to say they wore a mask outside during the period studied, and more likely to stay home, except for trips to buy food. However, political ideology was a stronger predictor of behavior.