Methodology: driven by data science for actionability

Real World Graph® — Unacast's core asset that provides a range of perspectives and critical context for how people relate to physical locations. The COVID-19 toolkit empowers organizations in unprecedented times, to make quality decisions quickly. The toolkit, powered by Unacast's robust team of data scientists and PhDs, focuses on data accuracy to ensure that our partners and clients get high-quality insights that reflect real-world events.

Social distancing is seen as the most effective way of slowing the spread of the virus causing COVID-19, and is strongly advised by the World Health Organization and the CDC. At Unacast, we wanted to understand which areas of the country are best at practicing social distancing behavior. Our hope is that this data will empower organizations and companies to understand and measure social distancing initiatives.

By focusing the geospatial human mobility insights our technology can surface, we created the Social Distancing Scoreboard as the first of many tools we are developing for a Unacast COVID-19 Toolkit — designed to provide high-quality insights to public agencies, healthcare organizations, local governments and businesses to enable them to learn and act in the best interest of at-risk populations and the general public.

About the data

Because our data comes in at varying latencies, we wait for three days after an event day for all the data for that given event date. Processing takes another day and therefore, the existing and default delay is four days from a given event date.

Read more on the methodology here.

Schema descriptions can be found here.

Please note that this is the pro bono version of the dataset used in our dashboard. It does not contain historic data and only has grades for each metric. If you would like access to the full dataset, please contact us here. You can also email us at esri_partner@unacast.com for more information on this and other data products.

A Note About Privacy

The Social Distancing Scoreboard and other tools being developed for the COVID-19 Toolkit do not identify any individual person, device, or household. However, to calculate the actual underlying social indexing score we combine tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day - and then extrapolate the results to the population level. As a company that originated in Norway we put privacy front and center and believe it to be an individual right, and since we operate on both sides of the Atlantic, we have been operating within the GDPR guidelines since May 2018 and this year also adopted the CCPA guidelines for the whole of the US (not only California).