Aggregated Mobility Tracking:
What Cell Phone Location Data is Telling Scientists About the Impact of Stay-at-Home Orders
Mobility declined by more than 75% in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, Taos, Los Alamos, Sandoval, Bernalillo, Valencia, Quay, Otero and Grant counties. Graphic: Courtesy of Descartes Labs
Restricting travel and practicing social distance are two of the main strategies being urged by public health experts for slowing and eventually ending the spread of COVID-19. One way data scientists, including some in New Mexico, are monitoring the effectiveness of these strategies is by using location data from cell phone companies to see if people are logging fewer miles and distances. The use of cell phone location data is cause for legitimate privacy concerns, however, the companies that are using it maintain that the source data is always anonymized and not associated with specific devices.
On March 23rd, the New York Times featured a series of eight maps provided by Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs that showed county-by-county travel distances between March 11th and March 20th in every county of the United States. Overall the decline was dramatic. At the request of the Journal North, Descartes Labs looked at mobility data collected from New Mexico’s 33 counties between February 17th and March 6th and compared it to data collected after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a stay-at-home order on March 23rd. According to the Journal North, what they found was that mobility declined by more than 75% in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba, Taos, Los Alamos, Sandoval, Bernalillo, Valencia, Quay, Otero and Grant counties. Mobility increased in Guadalupe and Hidalgo counties, and no data was available for the rural counties of Union, Mora, Harding, De Baca and Catron where cell phone towers are few and far between.
What this means is that New Mexicans are doing a good job so far of working together to reduce COVID-19 transmission via “community spread”—the spread of a contagious disease to individuals in a particular community or geographic location who have had no known contact with another infected individual or who have not recently traveled to an area where the disease has any documented cases.
Data science will continue to add to our knowledge of COVID-19 and guide decisions about how to stop its spread. It will also help identify when conditions improve enough that restrictions can begin to loosen up, schools and businesses can reopen, and economic recovery can begin.
Author: Mimi Roberts
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