With Palm Beach County having begun the reopening process on Monday with Broward and Miami-Dade likely to join next week, I thought it would be a good time to see how the pandemic impacted our behavior. By now you’ve probably heard of the various ways data from our mobile devices has been used by companies and governments alike to gauge our behavior during the pandemic. One of the analytics firms aggregating this information is Safegraph. They paint a picture of how much of an impact the pandemic has had on our daily behavior in South Florida. It starts with when we began to meaningfully change our behavior.
It started on March 16th, prior to any governments within Florida issuing emergency declarations and lockdowns. It’s illustrative that many Floridians didn’t require government mandates to alter their behavior by generally spending more time at home. The next date is the peak day for staying at home. That occurred on April 9th-incidentally about a week after what turned out to be the peak day for cases in Florida, April 3rd. On April 9th, 44.3% of Floridians didn’t leave home, that’s double the pre-pandemic rate. Most recently, last Friday. The following are the top five counties for staying at-home in Florida:
- #5 Palm Beach
- #4 Orange
- #3 Miami-Dade
- #2 Broward
- #1 Osceola
Notably, two of the top five, Orange and Osceola, weren’t under lockdowns last week. This is consistent with the self-governance we saw in March prior to the mandated lockdowns. It helps illustrate the lack of a need for one-size-fits-all mandates aimed at controlling counties. It also should be considered by state and local officials going forward. Will there always be an element in society that won’t act responsibly? Yes, but that’s always the case, isn’t it? What’s interesting is that Floridians changed behavior before it was mandatory to do so, had the greatest adherence to stay-at-home policies a week after what turned out to be the peak of cases in our state, and are still exercising caution during reopening policies.
Photo by: Getty Images North America