A Social Distancing Scorecard

Unacast, a mobility data company based in New York and Oslo, has created a Social Distancing Scoreboard to track the success of Americans in reducing travel in the days and weeks since the coronavirus pandemic has spread across the country.

A blog post by Thomas Walle, CEO and co-Founder, of Unacast, explains the Scoreboard's methodology. The company uses its Real World Graph® data engine to identify geospatial mobility data. After several iterations, the company decided to use "change in average distance traveled" as its metric for the Scorecard.

As for the final tally, the Scorecard assigns letter grades based on whether the change in average mobility has dropped more than 40 percent (an A Grade), between 30 and 40 percent (B), 20 to 30 percent (C), 10 to 20 percent (D), and less than a 10 percent decrease (an F grade).

The Scorecard includes a grade for the entire United States (B), as well as grades for every state and county. The five states leading the social distancing effort, as of this writing: the District of Columbia (considered a state here), Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The states reducing average distance traveled the least, as of this writing, are Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, and Oregon.

For an additional comparison, the state currently considered the hot bed of the pandemic, New York, has reduced average distance traveled by 48 percent. The country's most populous states, California, has also reduced average distance traveled by 48 percent. Both of those metrics were last updated on March 24 as of this writing.

Unacast is promising that the Social Distancing Scorecard is only the first of multiple releases it has planned for a COVID-19 Toolkit.