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Social Distancing Wanes as States Loosen Coronavirus Curbs
Cellphone location data indicates Americans were on the move before states began lifting stay-at-home orders
After two months of social distancing, states across the country have begun relaxing stay-at-home measures. But the habits of U.S. residents, based on data from millions of cellphones, indicates Americans have been on the move even before official government orders eased restrictions.
Data from Unacast, a location-data firm, showed a steep decline in movement even before states implemented restrictions. As authorities have begun to lift those curbs and others prepare to do so, more Americans are coming into closer contact again.
The data measures the frequency at which two people come within 50 meters of each other for an hour or less, relative to a national baseline during the four weeks immediately preceding the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. Unacast uses anonymized GPS location information from some 25 million U.S. mobile devices to estimate movements at the state and county levels.
Unacast Chief Executive and founder Thomas Walle said that while it is too early to know for certain, there could be many reasons for the increase in activity, from waning concerns about health-care systems collapsing to the lifting of restrictions in some areas.
Americans also might simply be tired of staying home.
“We see a spike in the weekends: People are off work, they want to socialize, they want to get out and get some fresh air,” Mr. Walle said. “The question is: Is this social-distancing fatigue? That’s what we hear a lot of discussions about from other companies and people using our data.”
Increased social activity could be most consequential in densely populated areas in and around major cities, where more frequent close encounters put people at higher risk of potential infection. Here is how habits have changed across the country, according to Unacast’s data.
As Americans begin to relax their social-distancing practices, other mitigation factors could be key to limiting further infections, such as wearing face masks in public.
Self-reported mask-wearing varies among states, according to survey data from YouGov. In states where businesses remain mostly closed, residents are more likely to say they have worn a face mask when they went out in public in the past two weeks. These states also have higher Covid-19 death rates.
Write to Max Rust at max.rust@dowjones.com
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