Changes of Grocery Shopping Frequencies and Associations with Food Deserts during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered people ’s lives in multiple aspects, including grocery shopping behaviors. Yet, the changing trend of grocery shopping frequencies during the COVID-19 and its associations with food deserts remain unclear. We aimed to (1) examine variations of grocery shopping frequencies at county level in the USA durin g the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 to December 2021; (2) investigate associations between grocery shopping frequencies and food deserts during the COVID-19 pandemic; and (3) explore heterogeneity in grocery shopping frequencies—food desert associations across urban and rural areas. The county -level grocery shopping frequencies were derived from a grocery pattern dataset obtained from SafeGraph. We divided the 22-month period into 5 stages and employed the growth curve modeling to estimate the trajectories of grocery shopping frequencies and the associations between grocery shopping freq uencies and food deserts in each stage, separately. Results revealed that grocery shopping frequencies experienced a “W-shaped” pattern from March 2020 to December 2021. Counties with the least percent of food deserts had slower decrease in grocery shopping frequencies at the initial stage and r ecovered more rapidly at later stages. Counties with the highest percent of food deserts were subject to deprivation amplification as a result of the pandemic. We also found differences existed in the grocery shopping frequencies—fo...
Source: Journal of Urban Health - Category: Health Management Source Type: research