In July 2020, the New York Times conducted a survey asking the general public (~250,000 participants) what percentage of the time they wore a mask when within 6ft of people in public. The results of this survey can be accessed via the Times’ GitHub repository here: NYT GitHub.
The dataset expressed mask usage in categories of: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Frequently, and Always and then gave the percentage of respondents for each category at the county level. I used these proportions to create a scale from 0-1 and mapped the results in a choropleth. The map was generated in Python with the Plotly package.
Takeaway: It seems the farther inland one goes, the less citizens are wearing masks. One theory was the partisanship of the county as COVID was highly polarized politically. Another explanation is the increase in ruralness and decreasing population density as one travels inward. However, the survey question specified when one is within 6ft of another person in public so as to avoid this issue. Survey data is always tricky.
BRITTANY MORIN 