Despite winning praise from the White House and governors for following social distancing recommendations to curb the spread of the coronavirus, new data shows that less than 4 in 10 are staying home.
Worse: On average, just 4.3% changed their “mobility behavior,” according to a vast study of location data from mobile devices and in-car mapping tools conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.
And the trips people are taking every day are not all to work. Just 14% are work-related trips, and a lot of trips are far from homes and even across state lines, the data shared with Secrets showed.
“Government advisories and stay-at-home orders have reduced trip distance across the nation, and in some states, the percentage of people staying home and trip rates too. However, they have not fully accomplished the expected change in mobility behavior, according to our data analysis,” said Maryland Transportation Institute Director and Herbert Rabin Distinguished Professor Lei Zhang.
“Government agencies need to improve the effectiveness of physical distancing and stay-at-home orders by educating the general public, increasing enforcement, working with employers and communities, and supporting vulnerable populations who may encounter challenges in meeting social distancing requirements,” said Zhang.
He said that after an increase in compliance when the social distancing rules were issued in March and early April, those who stuck with them had already been practicing the procedures before the White House and governors issued their recommendations.
“Those who are able to adopt social distancing practices already did so before government intervention. Those who cannot or do not want to stay at home show significant behavior inertia and render government stay-at-home orders much less effective than expected,” he said.
The poor results of America’s adherence to social distancing policies may be the reason it hasn’t kicked the virus, and also why some states are seeing an increase in cases.
In Georgia, for example, where more cases are being recorded, just 31% are following stay-at-home rules and travel on average 21 miles a day over 2.5 trips.
In Wyoming, the last state to record at least one death from the virus, people take an average of 2.9 trips a day and travel 33 miles.
The best states in the engineering school’s data deep dive weren’t great either. In Washington, D.C., and New York, the state hit hardest with cases and COVID-19 deaths, about half obeyed stay-at-home orders.
“The District of Columbia and New York state have the highest percentage of people who are staying at home in the nation, but that percentage has stagnated around 54% for the District of Columbia and 49% for New York for weeks, even after shelter-in-place restrictions were imposed,” the analytics platform developed by the school located just outside Washington said.
The school is planning to update the data daily and is making its COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform available to governments and the public.
“We plan on rolling out new statistics, correlated data, information visualizations, and other tools to the platform daily to enable more insights and discoveries,” said Maryland’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory Director Michael Pack.
“COVID-19 is a complex challenge with broad-ranging impact,” said Clark School Professor Darryll J. Pines, who will become president of the university in July after 11 years as dean of the engineering school. “One of our strengths at UMD is our ability to bring together knowledge from varied disciplines, in this case, transportation engineering, public health, data analytics, and economics, to address problems that are complex by nature.”
