Chicago scores an 'A’ in social distancing, according to GPS project - Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune |
Mar 24, 2020 | 8:36 PM
Two people walk past each other in the 5300 block of North Clark Street on March 24, 2020, in Chicago. Social distancing is strongly encouraged as a preventive measure against COVID-19, or the coronavirus.(John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)
Chicagoans were ordered to stay at home starting last weekend and, according to a company grading social distancing, the city’s getting an A.
Both Cook County and the state of Illinois have high marks as of Tuesday on the “
Social Distancing Scoreboard,” an interactive project based on GPS location data collected by the company Unacast that roughly measures whether or not people are heeding the advice of officials to “flatten the curve” of the spread of the coronavirus.
The scores were determined by the change in average distance traveled compared with before the coronavirus outbreak. If residents are staying put aside from the occasional trip to the grocery store or pharmacy, the dip in travel would be apparent in the data.
A more than 40% decrease leads to an A, with grades dropping from there. Anything less than a 10% decrease — or an increase — ends in an F.
Wyoming, with a 0% change in travel, got an F.
Illinois had a 40% decrease by March 21, according to Unacast’s board. Cook County saw a 44% decrease.
The counties doing the best in the state include: Edwards, Crawford, Macon, Pope and Menard. And the worst: Washington, Fayette, Johnson, Massac and Cumberland.
The entire country has a B, overall.
As for the data, the company says the tools don’t identify individuals or devices, but scores are calculated by combining “tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day” and then extrapolating the results.
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“We created the Social Distancing Scoreboard as the first of many tools to help organizations and businesses better understand public behavior in a post COVID-19 world," said Thomas Walle, CEO and co-founder at Unacast, in a news release. "We’ll be updating the Scorecard and enhancing this COVID-19 Toolkit to provide the most timely and accurate information possible, with the hope of ultimately saving lives.”
Unacast says it plans to continue to improve its social distancing models.
“Travel distance is one aspect, but of course people can travel far without meeting a soul or travel 50 feet and end up in a crowd — so we know that the real world picture can be quite complex,” the company’s website says.
The scoreboard, the first tool the company has developed as part of its “COVID-19 Toolkit,” will be updated daily. Change in the number of encounters for an area and change in the number of locations are a couple of layers the company is considering adding to the scores, according to its website.
On Tuesday, four more deaths related to COVID-19 in Illinois were announced, bringing the state’s total to 16 deaths. There are now 1,535 confirmed cases in Illinois, with more than 1,000 of them in Cook County.
Morgan Greene is a metro reporter for the Chicago Tribune who covers human interest stories, breaking news, the park district and everything in between. A Cleveland native, she graduated from the Theatre School at DePaul University, joined the Tribune in 2015 as an editorial assistant and still enjoys seeing a good show on a night off.
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