there's a reason why so many of the places where distance traveled fell below 2 miles earlier are in cities. a lot of the South is rural, and, more importantly, a lot of places don't have access to essential goods and services (groceries, internet, healthcare) w/o travel.
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there's also a policy reason, obviously: Southern governors and, in many cases, Southern mayors have been slow to institute stay-at-home orders. plus, you're dealing with a lack of information access: the rural South has some of the lowest rates of internet access in the country.
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all of which becomes much clearer in the second map. you can see that **relative** rates of travel have fallen in Southern counties at ~same level as many Western counties, which is context you don't get at all in the first map.
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so yeah, things are bad in the South and are only going to get worse. but it's a very complex situation that is not helped by your "hur hur hur look at those idiots" takes.
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if you made it all the way to the end of this thread, please read this story.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-unique-threat-south-young-people/609241/ …
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I should say: both of those maps were NYT maps and I think the accompanying story is actually great. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html …
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Their list of where people are still traveling the most only includes counties of >500,000 people (for context, I reported a story on a rural county of just 2,000 people last year), and does include a lot of urban Southern counties.pic.twitter.com/M2qcBrYtuC
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to add one last thing: healthcare in the rural South is in a very, very bad state right now. if you're in the rural South and know of a hospital or clinic closing near you and/or healthcare workers being furloughed, please DM or email me (in bio).https://www.facingsouth.org/2020/03/covid-19-exposes-precarious-state-rural-health-care-south …
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that's correct... the south is rural with mass land areas - but not being prepared or considering the situation a hoax, makes it worse for them and the country
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but in the first chart no matter how locked down we are (I'd been in my house for 20 straight days) -- my average trip to get groceries the other day was about 8 miles round trip, so that automatically means dark red for my statistic
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