States around the country are starting to lift the restrictions on businesses and movement in the hopes of reviving a struggling economy. I was curious how people are responding to those changes. Are they continuing to stay home? Or are they taking that as a sign that it is safe to resume normal activity? You see pictures of crowded beaches on the news, but are those the exception or the rule?
One way to track this is to look at where people spend their time. Google maps apps (with location services turned on) are constantly sending information about where people's phones are located, and it seems reasonable to assume that where phones go, people go as well. Google has aggregated this data and used it to estimate how the percentage of time that people spend in a variety of different types of areas compares to a pre-COVID19 baseline. This data is available for public use here: https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
I used this data to compute a 7 day moving average (to smooth out some of the variation between weekdays and weekends) of these values and plotted them since early March. Early on, there was a steady decline in activity that leveled off in late March (around the time stay-at-home orders were starting to be put in place around the country). However, in the last week or two, the activity levels in a number of states are starting to increase again. Here are a few of the states with more dramatic rises in recent days.
You can check out the data from your state here: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/mpanaggio/covid_19_tracking/master?filepath=data_exploration.ipynb
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Only time will tell. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all lagging indicators so it may take a little while before we can ascertain the effects of these changing behaviors on the spread of the virus. I, for one, will be monitoring those metrics closely. Here is a nice visualization tool (more polished than any of mine) if you want to see the latest new case totals from each state.
There is some good news, after stalling out for a couple of days, the number of tests administered each day has started increasing again and is approaching 250k per day (up from 150k a couple of weeks ago).
