Now check out what Vox wrote about the social distancing tracker

How can they even claim this when it’s the shit hole big cities filled with Dems that are the worst hit?

They are blaming us for spreading it to them!


As nations like China and Singapore with more centralized governments and public health systems have been relatively effective in enforcing social distancing and containing coronavirus, the response in the United States has been fragmented and incoherent.

California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order on March 19, but as of April 8 five states still had no order and three others had orders for only some parts of the state.

Even as the last holdouts gradually give in and order their residents to shelter in place, data tracking mobile phone locations suggests that many Americans have not fundamentally altered their behavior.

Unacast, a company specializing in the analysis of “human mobility data,” has put together a Social Distancing Scoreboard that measures average distance traveled as well as “nonessential visits” to venues like spas, cinemas, jewelers, and department and clothing stores.

Containing the spread of the coronavirus requires collective, unified action, but data on social distancing makes it clear this isn’t happening everywhere.

The question is why.

In what kinds of places are residents deciding to move about as if they are immune to the virus that has paralyzed much of the world?

What do they look like, and why are they ignoring the calls for social distancing?

To get some hints, I put together several sources of data from US counties focusing on economic and demographic characteristics, voting patterns, civic engagement and social capital, and even attitudes toward climate change from Yale’s Climate Change in the American Mind survey.


Analyzing the data reveals that social distancing behavior is related to education; to race and ethnicity; to political identity and social capital; and to the impact that this virus has already had on the residents of particular counties.

And the various sources of data also reveal a larger pattern.

One of the strongest and most robust predictors of social distancing behavior is found in attitudes toward another major challenge facing the United States: climate change.

Places where residents are less likely to agree that global warming is happening, that humans are the cause, and that we have an obligation to do something about it are the places where residents haven’t changed their behavior in response to coronavirus.

The analysis makes clear that we have a collective action problem much larger than Covid-19.

Other measures like the age profile of the county, the total size of the population, the racial and ethnic composition, and even the total number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 do not have a clear relationship with social distancing behavior. Different characteristics turn out to be much better predictors; the strongest predictors are shown in the chart above.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, politics and civic engagement bear a strong relationship to social distancing behavior. Higher levels of social capital — a combination of voter turnout in federal elections, response rates in the 2010 census, the number of associations and the number of nonprofits per capita — is associated with more social distancing.

By contrast, counties with the greatest share of votes for Trump in the 2016 election were least likely to practice social distancing. And the greater the share of residents who disagreed with the statement that global warming is happening, the worse the county’s grade received in the Social Distancing Scoreboard.

Social distancing grades rise with the level of social capital in a county, and grades fall with the percentage of the county voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2016.


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