Denver County
Mobility
We provide insights into the mobility pattern of individuals within the county using mobile device location data from SafeGraph. To preserve privacy, SafeGraph applies differential privacy techniques to add noise to the data values and then includes only attributes with at least two devices. The sample of devices represents approximately 5% of the population. While the data are not suspected to be systematically biased, the data provide estimates of trends and are subject to variability.
We use this mobile device data to show the travel to Denver County from counties outside of Colorado. The width of the lines corresponds to more travelers from each county, and the color depicts the number of new daily cases in those counties (national county case data is collected from the NYTimes). Wider lines represent more visits from those counties; darker lines show higher new case counts in the origin counties.
We also include the total visits to Denver County in the time series plot below, in which we smooth the trend by calculating a 5-day moving average. A lower value in this year reflects a decrease in travel relative to the same time in the year prior.
Figure 1: Mobility and cases
The mobile device data also contain information on visitation to location categories within each county. We plot visits to a locations within a category as a fraction of the number of devices within Denver County (Visitation Rate). As in previous graphs, we compare the trends in this year with the same time in the year before (note that some counties may have limited industries shown to data limitations). Hover over the figure to see the data or the average during the stay at home period. Grocery stores are representative examples of essential businesses. Restaurants, bars, and parks are useful for understanding recreation decisions, and hotels show travel. We have zoomed in to show detail so the vertical scale may differ across plots.
Decreases in visitation to points of interest (excluding parks) reflect temporary and permanent business closures, as well as adherence to stay at home orders. Visits to parks may have increased in response to these same changes. There may be increases in visits to business in certain counties owing to curbside and take out service, as well as visits by travelers to or from outdoor recreation.
More information on how these metrics were calculated can be found in the Colorado University Mobility Report.Figure 2: Visitation to points of interest
Updated: 2021-08-26
Data sources:
https://www.safegraph.com/
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/master/us-counties.csv
https://data.colorado.gov/Labor-and-Employment/Employee-Counts-by-Industry-in-Colorado/cjkq-q9ih
Created by:
Gal Sam Koss\(^1\) and Colorado COVID-19 Modeling Group \(^1\) Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University