While social capital is commonly held to support collective action, according to Putnam (2000) and Bourdieu (1986) social disparities may result in the formation of narrow social bonds that serve to exacerbate existing social cleavages and may serve as an impediment to effective collective action. Motivated by this insight, we examine the relationship between social disparities and social distancing during the initial, pre-vaccine period of the Covid pandemic in the US. Using a panel of weekly, county-level observations, we find that income, educational and racial disparities are associated with a statistically significant decrease in the social distancing. This result is robust to controls for a wide variety of socioeconomic variables as well as to the contemporaneous infection rate and a commonly used measures of social capital. Our results are consistent with Putnam and Bourdieu’s claims regarding the role of social disparities in the formation of social capital and suggest gains to the development of measures that capture different forms of social capital.