By measuring people’s movement using cell phone data, companies can tell whether or not people are staying home. What is interesting here is that the counties in Florida that are staying home are also the ones with the highest number of infections. This seems to support my theory that the quarantine isn’t working. I would love to see a statistical analysis of the data to see if there is a correlation between illness rates and travel.

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6 Comments

jwl · March 28, 2020 at 1:16 pm

Where did you find this map? Thanks.

Divemedic · March 28, 2020 at 2:51 pm

Here it is:

https://www.unacast.com/covid19/social-distancing-scoreboard

jwl · March 28, 2020 at 4:02 pm

Thanks much!

jwl · March 28, 2020 at 4:03 pm

Thanks much!

SiGraybeard · March 29, 2020 at 2:48 pm

Can I throw a variable in here? I looked at Brevard county and see we're a C. The very rural counties are the lowest grades and the most metropolitan counties are the best.

Around here, a major employer is the space center, and that's a long drive from just about anywhere. If people are still working, they're going to make that commute.

In a densely populated area, maybe what it's seeing is that the commutes are shorter and they're moving less because they have less need to travel?

Jonathan H · March 30, 2020 at 2:21 pm

I'm with SiGB – the map looks to me like the urban areas with high population densities travel less than rural areas with low population densities – which is a "No Duh" sort of thing…

I've seen this data mentioned before, but what I haven't seen is where the data comes from or how complete it it. Are they using cell tower data that is fairly complete, or are they using app location data, which is more than likely incomplete? For example, if their data is from Google Maps, many don't need it for their regular commute, and it is more likely to be used on long commutes with possible traffic, so that alone would skew data.
I have location services turned off on my phone, so the only the data could include people like me is through the use of cell tower data – which is approximate only to begin with…

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