Shelter in Place Index

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions. Shortly thereafter, different parts of the United States began rolling out social distancing and other recommendations for nonpharmaceutical interventions. How did our nation respond to shelter in place orders? The folks at SafeGraph provide a dashboard view of their Shelter in Place Index (a.k.a. Stay at Home Index):



The dashboard visualizes the change in the percentage of people staying home as compared with baseline measures. The “stay at home” determinations are based on data from more than 45 million smartphones which SafeGraph asserts is a representative sample of Americans.

The index represents whether someone stays at home or not. It doesn’t factor in the distance traveled from home because “one does not need to travel long distances to undermine social-distancing and enable viral transmission” according to SafeGraph. “Home” is defined as “ the most common nighttime location in recent months identified to a precision of about 100 square meters.” SafeGraph provides transparency about their methodology and data schema for those of you who want to take a closer look.

While Americans appear to have increasingly stayed at home from mid-March to a peak in mid-April, it appears that we have relaxed our adherence to shelter in place recommendations in the past couple weeks as discussed in this article. For a graphic comparison, see this rolling 3-day average of new confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States:



We appear to be holding steady with the number of new cases per day. The obvious conclusions are that (1) at least the number of daily cases is not increasing and (2) it would be better if we started to see a decline. We are still in the midst of a global pandemic, and we still have a lot of work to do before we get things under control.