  We investigate the difference in the spread of COVID-19 between the states
won by Donald Trump (Red) and the states won by Hillary Clinton (Blue) in the
2016 presidential election, by mining transportation patterns of US residents
from March 2020 to July 2020. To ensure a fair comparison, we first use a
K-means clustering method to group the 50 states into five clusters according
to their population, area and population density. We then characterize daily
transportation patterns of the residents of different states using the mean
percentage of residents traveling and the number of trips per person. For each
state, we study the correlations between travel patterns and infection rate for
a 2-month period before and after the official states reopening dates. We
observe that during the lock-down, Red and Blue states both displayed strong
positive correlations between their travel patterns and infection rates.
However, after states reopened we find that Red states had higher
travel-infection correlations than Blue states in all five state clusters. We
find that the residents of both Red and Blue states displayed similar travel
patterns during the period post the reopening of states, leading us to conclude
that, on average, the residents in Red states might be mobilizing less safely
than the residents in Blue states. Furthermore, we use temperature data to
attempt to explain the difference in the way residents travel and practice
safety measures.
