Association of Protective Behaviors with Sars-Cov-2 Infection: Results from a Longitudinal Cohort Study of Adults in the San Francisco Bay Area
51 Pages Posted: 21 Feb 2023
Abstract
To decrease transmission of COVID-19, public health officials have encouraged or mandated masking, social distancing, and working from home, and have restricted travel. However, many studies of the effectiveness of these measures have significant methodologic limitations. In this analysis, we used data from the TrackCOVID study, a large, longitudinal cohort study of a population-based sample of 3,846 adults in the San Francisco Bay Area, to evaluate the association between self-reported protective behaviors including masking, physical distancing, travel and working outside the home, and incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Participants were tested and surveyed monthly for a median of 4 visits between August 2020 and March 2021. Most participants (80.0%) reported always wearing a mask and 56.0% reported most of the time or sometimes avoiding contact with those outside their household. Participants reported traveling outside the state in 7.7% of months. At baseline, 16.0% of participants worked 20 or more hours per week outside the home. Working outside the home for 20 or more hours per week was associated with incident infection (aHR 1.62, 95% CI 1.02-2.59). These results suggest that working outside the home may be one of the most important behavioral risk factors for COVID-19 infection.
Note:
Funding Information: This work was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Conflict of Interests: None.
Ethical Approval: The study was reviewed and classified as public health surveillance by both the University of California, San Francisco Office of Human Research Protection and Stanford University Institutional Review Boards.
Keywords: Longitudinal cohort study, COVID, risk factors, masking, travel, Social distancing, working outside the home, COVID-19
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