JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for additional data, tools, and methods that can be used to combat emerging and existing public health concerns. Since March 2020, there has been great interest in utilizing social media data to both understand and intervene in the pandemic. Researchers from many disciplines have recently found a relationship between COVID-19 and a new data set from Facebook called the Social Connectedness Index (SCI).

Objective:

Building off this work, we sought to use the SCI to examine how social similarity of Missouri counties could explain similarities of COVID-19 cases over time. Additionally, we aimed to add to the body of literature on the utility of the SCI by using a novel modeling technique

Methods:

In this cross-sectional study, we analyzed publicly available data to test the association between the SCI and COVID-19 spread in Missouri using exponential random graph modeling (ERGM). ERGMs model relational data and the outcome variable must be binary; representing the presence or absence of a relationship. In our model, this was the presence or absence of a highly correlated COVID-19 case count trajectory between two given counties in Missouri. Covariates included each county’s total population, percent rurality, and distance between each county pair.

Results:

All covariates were significant predictors of two counties having highly correlated COVID-19 case count trajectories. We found that as the social connectedness increases between two Missouri counties increases, the odds of those two counties having highly correlated COVID-19 case count trajectories significantly increases by 18%, controlling for the counties’ population size, rurality, and the distance between the two counties.

Conclusions:

These results could suggest that two counties with a greater likelihood of sharing Facebook friendships means residents of those counties have a higher likelihood of sharing similar belief systems, in particular as they relate to COVID-19 and public health practices. Another possibility is that the SCI is picking up travel or movement data among county residents. This suggests the SCI is capturing a unique phenomenon relevant to COVID-19 and that it may be worth adding to other COVID-19 models. Additional research is needed to better understand what the SCI is capturing practically and what it means for public health policies and prevention practices.