Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html

Stay-at-home orders have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates.

The divide in travel patterns, based on anonymous cellphone data from 15 million people, suggests that Americans in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home.

In areas where public officials resisted or delayed stay-at-home orders, people changed their habits far less. Though travel distances in those places have fallen drastically, last week they were still typically more than three times those in areas that imposed lockdown orders.

A half-dozen of the most populous counties where residents were traveling widely last week are in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis resisted calling for a statewide lockdown until Wednesday.

Counties with lax travel policies risk not only becoming the next hot spots of the disease, but also acting as reservoirs for the virus that reignite infection in places that have tamped it down, they said.

Florida waited so long to shut down travel that it will struggle to control local outbreaks even if people immediately change their behavior significantly, said Thomas Hladish, an infectious disease modeler at the University of Florida.

"A lockdown order right now is not going to be a silver bullet with containing this," Mr. Hladish said. "It will absolutely save lives. But in order to really have a big effect with social-distancing measures, you would have had to move it back in time.”

Other areas reduced travel weeks ago, the data show, especially in California, New York and Washington, which were the first to experience large outbreaks.

Disease experts said that a tenfold reduction in travel in many counties in the United States gave them hope that other places could have similar success, as long as the reductions remain in effect for an extended period and are implemented nationwide.

Control measures typically take two to three weeks to show an effect because of the time it takes for infected people to develop symptoms, seek medical care and get tested.

Other factors play a big role, including how quickly sick people are tested and isolated, how closely people tend to congregate — and luck. The inconsistencies in policies — and in when they are imposed — may create new problems, even for places that set limits weeks ago.

Stay The F*ck at Home - A Covid 19 Song