Modeling data from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi’s COVID-19 Task Force shows fewer people are going out in public.
During their weekly briefing today at city hall, the researchers explained how cell-phone data indicates a change in people's behavior -- specifically -- a drop in the number of social encounters.
“The more people you come in contact with, the higher probability is that you either transmit or contract COVID-19,” said researcher Christopher Bird. “That's why we like to see this metric going down -- because we need to decrease those numbers of encounters if we want to get this under control.”
They also noted that traffic at home-improvement stores and malls has also decreased slightly.
Bird is hopeful they'll start to see a decrease in the number of new cases next week as a result of the county's mandatory mask order, which went into effect last week.