New study shows how many Whatcom residents are staying home to fight coronavirus
Whatcom County is above average at following Gov. Jay Inslee’s “Stay Home Stay Safe” order to help curb the spread of COVID-19, new cellphone tracking-based data shows, but the area still has plenty of room for improvement in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
According to information released Tuesday, April 21, by online data company SafeGraph.com, 41.2% of Whatcom County residents did not leave their homes on Saturday, April 18. Before coronavirus spread to the region, SafeGraph reported an average of 26.5% of people in the county stayed home on a daily basis, meaning Whatcom has seen a 14.7 percentage point improvement.
Those numbers rank Whatcom 16th among Washington state’s 39 counties for the percentage of people staying home and 14th in the state for improvement, according to the data.
Unlike a Social Distancing Scorecard released by Unacast earlier this month, which tracked distance traveled, the SafeGraph stated it attempted to quantify the number of people following “staying at home” orders by actually staying home.
“Whether to visit a neighbor or to visit the grocery store, whether the distance traveled is 10 miles or 0.1 miles, all ‘away-from-home’ events are classified the same in this dashboard,” the SafeGraph report stated. “We think this is a useful metric because one does not need to travel long distances to undermine social-distancing and enable viral transmission.”
Measuring who actually stays home also enables better comparisons of rural, suburban and urban areas, the SafeGraph report stated.
To measure who was staying at home, SafeGraph said it used cellphone tracking data from 45 million devices nationwide to see which were staying within 100 square meters of their most common nighttime location (or home), according to the report. SafeGraph then compared the percentage of people staying home to a baseline number determined by an average from the seven days prior to Feb. 12 to determine its “Shelter in Place Index.”
Statewide, SafeGraph found that 43.7% of Washingtonians stayed home on Saturday — a Shelter in Place Index of 18.75 from pre-COVID-19 levels. Those numbers rank the state 16th and 20th, respectively, behind New Jersey (53% and 31.03 index) and New York (51.8% and 26.10 index).
In Washington, King and Snohomish counties — the two counties impacted with the most COVID-19 positive tests and deaths — lead the way. King County has a Shelter in Place Index of 25.24 with 48.6% people staying at home, while Snohomish’s index is 21.86 with 46.2% of residents staying home. The top 11 counties are all located on the west side of the Cascade mountains.
Counties on the east side of the mountains, meanwhile, account for seven of the 10 lowest Shelter in Place Indexes, with Ferry County lowest with a 7.22 index, though 41.5% of residents are staying home.
Inslee first announced his order for all non-essential employees in the state to stay at home for two weeks on March 23, and on April 3 he extended the order through May 4.
On Tuesday, Inslee outlined a roadmap for a “safe return to public life” from the new coronavirus pandemic, but he did not say when the stay-at-home order and partial business closures will end.
