  The rapid spread of COVID-19 has affected thousands of people from different
socio-demographic groups all over the country. A decisive step in preventing or
slowing the outbreak is the use of mobility interventions, such as government
stay-at-home orders. However, different socio-demographic groups might have
different responses to these orders and regulations. In this paper, we attempt
to fill the current gap in the literature by examining how different
communities with different age groups performed social distancing by following
orders such as the national emergency declaration on March 13, as well as how
fast they started changing their behavior after the regulations were imposed.
For this purpose, we calculated the behavior changes of people in different
mobility metrics, such as percentage of people staying home during the study
period (March, April, and May 2020), in different age groups in comparison to
the days before the pandemic (January and February 2020), by utilizing
anonymized and privacy-protected mobile device data. Our study indicates that
senior communities outperformed younger communities in terms of their behavior
change. Senior communities not only had a faster response to the outbreak in
comparison to young communities, they also had better performance consistency
during the pandemic.
