New Jersey is doing a good job of sheltering in place and respecting social distancing, according to data by Uncast, a company that collects and analyzes GPS cell phone location data. The company just revealed its Social Distancing Scoreboard, which compares our mobility before the COVID-19 pandemic with current daily life.
New Jersey scores an A and is among the top 5 states (including the District of Columbia) respecting “just stay home” rules. The top 5 are the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Nevada, Massachusetts and New Jersey. The bottom 5 are North Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Arkansas and Wyoming.
States on the map colored in teal blue are doing a better job quarantining versus states in orange, according to company data. Each state was given a grade of A (which indicates a 40 percent decrease in social behavior) to F (which marks a less than 10 percent drop in social behavior). You can also drill down on the data in your state to see what was captured for your local county.
Uncast
Here’s what the company took into account for starters when developing its social distancing scores:
- People staying home vs. outside their homes (an indicator of how much a state is following “shelter-in-place” behavior)
- Changes in average time spent in and around the house (an indicator of how much time people spend at home versus other venues)
- Change in the number of people no longer gathering in the same location at the same time
- Change in average distance traveled
The company is continuously refining its data, realizing that families may have temporarily moved to a parents’ home or a second home. Some may also be traveling a far distance without having any human contact.
“As we better understand our data and how it describes the new world under COVID-19, we will continuously update our social distancing score as well as develop other datasets that can be used in the fight against COVID-19,” the company says in its website.