Every county in the Houston metro area earns a really unhealthy grade for social distancing, a data-gathering company says.
A widely used social distancing scoreboard from Unacast, a provider of location data and analytics, shows only one county in the Houston area — Austin County — received a grade above an F for social distancing as of May 20. But Austin County doesn’t have much to brag about, since its social-distancing score is a D-. The Houston area’s eight other counties, including Harris, flunked.
Relying on a huge storehouse of cellphone data, the Unacast scoreboard measures social distancing activity on a daily basis in every state and county compared with activity before the coronavirus outbreak. The scorecard assigns a letter grade of A through F based on current social-distancing behavior.
Each grade takes into account three factors:
- Percentage change in average distance traveled compared with the pre-coronavirus period
- Percentage change in visits to nonessential places compared with the pre-coronavirus period
- Decrease in person-to-person encounters compared with the national pre-coronavirus average
So, how did Harris County, for instance, fare in those three categories? On May 20, its grade in each category was an F. Why? Because it had less than a 25 percent reduction in average mobility (based on distance traveled), less than a 55 percent reduction in nonessential visits, and less than a 40 percent decrease in “encounters density” compared with the national average.
The scoreboard indicates Harris County’s grades have bounced around. On April 4, for example, Harris County received an A in the nonessential-visit category for reducing those visits by at least 70 percent.
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in an interview published May 20 that he’s worried the easing of social distancing in Houston will lead to a spike in coronavirus cases.
“I think here in Houston we’re underachieving in a lot of aspects in public health, and it’s no fault of the … public health leaders,” Hotez said.
In Texas, the Houston area isn’t alone in its apparent failure, at least recently, to adhere to social-distancing guidelines.
On May 20, not a single county in the Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio metro areas earned higher than a D on the Unacast report card.
All five counties in the Austin area got F’s, as did all 13 counties in Dallas-Fort Worth, according to the scoreboard.
But as with Harris County, other metro areas’ scores in individual categories have fluctuated over time. Here are a few examples:
- On April 4, Travis and Dallas counties earned an A for at least a 70 percent reduction in nonessential visits.
- On April 11, Tarrant County received a B for a 55 percent to 70 percent drop in average mobility.
In the San Antonio area, Bandera County earned the highest grade (D) of any county in the state’s four major metros. Atascosa and Medina counties eked out grades of D-, while the remainder of the area’s counties wound up in the F column.
In line with trends for its major-county counterparts, Bexar County’s social distancing scores in individual categories have gone up and down. On April 11, for example, Bexar County earned a B for a 55 percent to 70 percent decline in average mobility.
The scores for the state’s major metros appear to reflect the recent loosening of stay-at-home restrictions across Texas. But health experts still recommend sticking with social-distancing measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In fact, Unacast points out that the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cite social distancing as the “most effective way” to combat coronavirus infections.
Unacast says it launched the social-distancing scoreboard in March to enable organizations to measure and grasp the efficiency of local social-distancing efforts.
“Data can be one of society’s most powerful weapons in this public health war,” Thomas Walle, co-founder and CEO of Unacast, says in an April 16 release.
