After Georgia Reopened, 62,000 Non-Georgians Came To Visit: Data

ATLANTA, GA — Georgia has become a kind laboratory for what happens when states reopen their economies, but it's what was happening outside the state that alerted researchers at the University of Maryland, who on Thursday said they'd tracked location data on the smartphones of some 62,000 additional visitors to the Peach State between April 24 and May 1.

The location data, which was provided to the researchers after being stripped of users' personal information, presents the most complete look yet available at the ongoing effects of Georgia's plan to partially reopen its economy.

"The pandemic has a lot to do with human mobility," said Chenfeng Xiong, an assistant professor and researcher at Maryland Transportation Institute, and who analyzed the smartphone data. The data on Georgia travel was included in the rollout of the institute's COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform, which tracks the effects of the coronavirus outbreak and measures states' readiness to reopen.

The 62,000 visitors to Georgia represents a 13 percent increase from the number of out-of-state travelers who entered the state the week before April 24, when the state's stay-at-home order was still in place, researchers found. Tracking data showed that most visitors came from Florida (17 percent) followed by Alabama (14 percent) South Carolina (12 percent) Tennessee (11 percent) and North Carolina (11 percent).

For Xiong, the data also raised questions about travel to Georgia from states still in lockdown. He noted that after the adjacent states, the next most traveled-from location is New York City, which remains in strict shutdown with 178,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 20,000 deaths.

"There's still a lot of things we don't know at this point," he said. "We're trying to figure the causality and consequences of early reopening."

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Before the outbreak of coronavirus, Xiong said his research involved using tracking data to measure state and national travel trends, and he used similar tools when it came to tracking travelers who traveled to Georgia after the coronavirus lockdown lifted.

In the case of coronavirus, though, travel data has more troubling implications.

"That's what we're concerned about, that [travel] brings the virus all over the place while things are reopening," he said, though he noted that it would several more days before researchers could begin to draw any conclusions about the effect of out-of-state travel on infection and death rates.

Moreover, Xiong pointed out that the data isn't precise enough to show traffic at individual businesses or public venues. Inside Georgia, he said the tracking data showed the number of residents staying at home down 7.7 percent, the number of trips on the average day up by 5.5 percent, and the length of the average trip increased 8.3 percent.

If there's one conclusion to draw, Xiong said, "this data supports that people are starting to move around after the reopening notice in Georgia."

On Thursday, Georgia reported an additional 30 more coronavirus-related deaths and nearly 700 new cases, bringing the total to 31,260 coronavirus cases statewide and a total of 1,335 deaths.

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