BOSTON — John Husson made sure his mask was on tight while throwing soft toss to his young daughter at Billings Field in West Roxbury.
Her travel league softball team is scheduled to begin games in Massachusetts and New Hampshire next week.
“We’re not quite as fearful, still a little bit fearful, but not nearly as bad,” Husson said about traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It seems a lot of our anxiety about leaving the house evaporated in the summer heat, and geolocation data from our cell phones support that theory.
“We’ve seen mobility going up across the country fairly gradually,” Mike Warren said.
Warren is the co-founder of Descartes Labs, a New Mexico research company that uses our geolocation data to measure mobility--or how far we travel from home on a typical day--during the pandemic.
The data shows Massachusetts mobility is back to 75 or 80 percent of what it was before the pandemic, according to Warren.
“We can see in some other states is actually back up to 100 percent or even larger,” Warren said.
The good news for all of us is that the number of COVID-19 cases continues to trend downward in Massachusetts, even as our travel ramps back up.
But Warren can’t explain why the number of cases have exploded in other parts of the country, like Florida and Arizona, even though the data shows their mobility is roughly the same as Massachusetts.
“Something is different. Is it because more people are indoors now because it’s been hot and you’re just breathing recirculated air conditioned air? Or are people wearing masks more consistently in places where the outbreak was more serious early on? We just don’t know,” Warren said.
Descartes Labs also provided a state-by-state breakdown of travel in the northeast that shows Vermonters are traveling the most in July.
Massachusetts and New York residents are venturing out the least, according to the graph.
Warren said the data they collect is already anonymized, and there’s no way Descartes Labs can trace it to an individual or their phone numbers.
“We additionally have some other policies to make sure that any of the data we produce couldn’t be combined with the data other people have in order to track an individual,” Warren said.
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