Social distancing score card: Which North Carolina counties are doing the best?
North Carolina got a solid “B” on social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but some counties are doing a lot better than others, according to a new study.
The company Unacast, which uses social mobility data from smart phones, looked at how much people are traveling in counties across the country.
The scoreboard ranks each area on how much travel has dropped since state and federal authorities started to push, and in some cases order, people to isolate themselves.
Counties with some of North Carolina’s biggest cities, including Wake, Mecklenburg, Durham, Guilford and New Hanover, all scored an “A,” as travel dropped by more than 40%.
Chowan, Dare and Hyde counties on the coast scored the highest in the state. Dare County, which includes a long stretch of the Outer Banks, has banned non-residents from entering.
A similar study from Descertes Lab found that people in rural counties in North Carolina, like Bertie, Scotland and Watauga, were actually traveling more.
“Since North Carolina announced its first reported case on March 3 in Wake County, the average distance traveled in those rural communities actually increased between 20% and 30%,” McClatchy News reported Monday.
Social distancing will likely increase in at least some areas of the state as local officials order people to “shelter in place” in more cities and towns. Mecklenburg County is the latest local government to order people to not leave their homes except for essentials like going to the grocery store or pharmacy.
On the other side of the scale, several counties got an “F” on North Carolina’s report card. Halifax, Tyrell, Pamlico and Polk counties all changed travel patterns the least, according to the study.
In Tyrrell County, on the coast, travel actually increased by 28%.
Unacast uses cellphone GPS data to rank counties on social distancing.
“The Social Distancing Scoreboard and other tools being developed for the Covid-19 Toolkit do not identify any individual person, device, or household. However to calculate the actual underlying social indexing score we combine tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day — and then extrapolate the results to the population level,” the company said.
The company said it is continuing to refine and update how the software handles the data to get a more accurate picture of how people are distancing.
Check out the social distancing scoreboard here.
