SALT LAKE CITY — Utahns seem to be getting antsy. New GPS data indicates they’re less likely to stay at home today than they were just a few days ago. And that doesn’t bode well for the statewide push to slow down the pandemic.
Public health and government officials are begging Americans to hunker down and avoid each other as much as possible to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus. How well we’re doing that varies from state to state, according to a Norwegian company that has been using before-the-pandemic and during-the-pandemic data to track how far we’re traveling, in the context of COVID-19 spread.
According to the Social Distancing Scoreboard by the company Unacast, the District of Columbia, Nevada, New Jersey, Vermont and Massachusetts are doing just fine. Each has earned an A, which means travel is down an average of at least 40%. But it’s a scorecard that changes frequently. The top 5 the day before included Rhode Island and Alaska, but they’ve since dropped in the rankings.
Wyoming hasn’t gotten the message and earned the sole F grade, though Montana and Idaho weren’t very far behind, with solid Ds. Hawaii dropped to a D, too, midweek.
Utahns reduced their travel by 33% through March 21 and earned a B. By March 25, the Beehive State had dropped to a C as confirmed coronavirus cases climbed and travel reduction fell to 27%, suggesting Utahns aren’t staying put as well as they had been. Initially, Summit County, then Piute, Wasatch, Garfield and Salt Lake counties each earned an A. By Friday, just Summit and Wasatch counties maintained those A grades.
On the other hand, self-isolation was not evident based on travel data in 15 Utah counties, which each received a failing grade, according to Unacast.
Social distancing — which means staying home when you can, working from home if it’s feasible and staying at least 6 feet away from others — is one of the top strategies suggested by the World Health Organization to reduce spread of the novel coronavirus so that people do not get COVID-19, which for thousands worldwide has proven deadly.
Dr. Lisa Lockerd Maragakis of Johns Hopkins Medicine wrote that “while it may be disappointing to hear that so many sports events, cruises, festivals and other gatherings are being canceled, there is a public health reason for these measures. These cancellations help stop or slow down the spread of disease, allowing the health care system to more readily care for patients over time.”
That’s why government and school officials have closed schools and universities, moving to online classes. Social distancing is also the theory behind encouraging people to visit using technology instead of in person and asking folks to use telemedicine instead of going straight to doctors’ offices and hospitals to initiate care.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others credit social distancing with bringing the pandemic under some semblance of control in China, where it originated, and said the practice has made a big difference in countries like Singapore that were not so hard-hit.
Unacast used its trademarked Real World Graph data engine and other tools the company said do not identify “any individual person, device, or household” to track travel, combining “tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day — and then extrapolate the results to the population level.”