Minneapolis Review

A New York City and Norway-based company that analyzes human mobility data developed a tool that grades each U.S. state and county on how well its residents are practicing social distancing with the novel coronavirus raging globally.

Unacast's Social Distancing Scoreboard gave Hennepin County high marks for doing its part to flatten the curve. Hennepin County, Minnesota’s largest county by population with approximately 1.2 million residents, earned an overall grade of ‘A’ when it comes to hunkering down at home and the practice of apportioning six feet of space between others.

Late last month, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed an executive order to place all of the Gopher State under a stay-at-home mandate. Per the order, residents are not to venture from their homes unless to purchase groceries, seek medical attention or report to work if they are essential employees. Most businesses – with the exception of grocery stores, banks, pharmacies, and hospitals – are forced to shutter.

Public playgrounds and the river trails in Minneapolis are ordered closed as well.

Residents can still go outside and exercise so as long as they practice social distancing. A violation of the order is punishable by a fine.

Minnesota as a whole received a ‘B’ from Unacast.

COVID-19 presented Unacast CEO and co-founder Thomas Walle an opportunity to provide a public service of sorts.

"We sat down and asked ourselves, 'How can we help? What can we do?'" Walle said. "Something we're really good at as a company is understanding social behavior, and our goal was to create awareness around what social distancing policies and guidelines are working, and which ones are not."

Unacast used real-time location data from tens of millions of mobile phones and calculated the average distance being traveled now compared with before the coronavirus outbreak and placed the data side by side with the number of confirmed cases in the state or county to get a grade.