Since the discovery of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in late 2019, there has been widespread debate about the severity and mitigation of COVID-19 risk. While many have alleged that both the scientific facts and public perceptions of COVID-19 risk have changed, there has been no comprehensive investigation of the “social facts” of COVID-19 risk, which encompass both scientific findings and ideological views, prior to their alleged shift in mid-June 2021. For this exploratory study I developed a new approach to structural topic modeling, the seeded structural topic model, to identify nuances in the social facts of COVID-19 risk and mitigation accounting for emotional undertones alongside sentence structure using tweets about “risk” by U.S. Twitter users from December 2019 through June 2021. The findings reveal that risk mitigating behavior in the United States does not always reflect perceptions of COVID-19 risk, and that risk perceptions maligned with scientific findings do not always reflect a rejection of scientific facts. I identify three major factors linking perceptions of COVID-19 risk with risk mitigating behavior in the United States: confusion about the science of COVID-19 risk and prevention, ease of access to tools needed to mitigate COVID-19 risk effectively, and “fear” that preventions themselves were harmful. For example, many attributed resisting masks to a (mis)understanding that COVID-19 transmission occurs primarily via droplet exposure. Others who accepted the predominant mode of transmission as airborne refuted the notion that an airborne pathogen could be mitigated with surgical masks, pointing to fit-tested N95 respirators as the appropriate alternative. Like masks, many believed vaccination and social [physical] distancing were futile, but many also feared they could cause worse illness and injury than COVID-19 infection. Access to masks was wealth-based, as was quarantining, making extreme inequality in the United States crucial for engagement with risk mitigation. Despite speculation that COVID-19 risk mitigating behavior in the United States reflects a “pro” or “anti” science ideology, the importance of “social facts” opposing scientific facts has not been taken seriously. Future studies examining the link between health beliefs and risky behavior should account for social, not just scientific, facts of risk.
