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Conducted by Stanford and Northwestern universities, researchers used mobile phone location data pulled from 10 U.S. cities and found that restaurants, cafes, and gyms really are the most common places where COVID-19 has been contracted.
In efforts to tamp down on the spread of COVID-19 amid a national spike in incidents, the governor has targetted restaurants and cafes as potential hotspots instituting a 9:30 p.m. curfew and requiring people to purchase food with alcoholic drinks. The curfew is near-universal, with exceptions for necessities and work. The idea is to get people home before they get too buzzed to make responsible decisions about public health.
Restaurants have also been on the radar of health inspectors who have temporarily closed some restaurants as well as a few retailers - and a lot of schools - due to the discovery of COVID-19 infections.
Researchers also learned that people grocery shopping in poorer neighborhoods were at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 than people who shop in more affluent areas. The average grocery store in lower-income areas was 59 percent more crowded than those shopping on the rich side of town, and on average visitors spent 17 percent longer shopping in the lower-income locations.
In the study, a number of simulations were conducted based on researchers' findings, allowing scientists to test the efficacy of different reopening strategies.
Researchers, who published their findings in Nature Today, first mapped how people moved in and out of 57,000 neighborhoods to points of interest, like churches, restaurants, hotels, car dealerships, and gyms, over the course of two months beginning in March. Then, they inserted these numbers into a "simple epidemiological model" that they had devised in an attempt to predict case numbers.
After inputting location data from Chicago between March 8 and April 15 into their formula, scientists found that their model had correctly predicted the number of reported COVID cases a month later.
“We are able to faithfully estimate the contact network between 100 million people for every hour of the day. That is the secret ingredient we have,” Jure Leskovec told Nature.com.
According to the team's model, Chicago would have reported 600,000 additional COVID cases if the city had reopened restaurants at the beginning of May while opening gyms at that time would have produced an additional 149,000 positives.
If all venues were open, according to the researchers' model, 3.3 million additional cases would have been reported.
However, the model estimated that, if the city had limited all venues to 30 percent capacity, the number of infections incurred would have been reduced by 1.1 million.
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