BUFFALO, N.Y. — As the Thanksgiving surge begins, new cell phone data reveals where people did not stay socially distant from one another over the Thanksgiving holiday.
NBC News first reported this story using information from more than 15-million cell phones the week of Thanksgiving.
The analytics and marketing company Cuebiq provided NBC with the data using location data from cell phones.
Cuebiq found people in more than 1,900 counties saw increased rates of closeness from November 22 to November 28 compared to the week before. Closeness means someone was within 50 feet of someone else outside of their own home for at least five minutes.
The number of counties where closeness levels peaked was the highest the day before Thanksgiving, which saw more people flying than any other day since March.
While Erie County and the Southern Tier didn't see increases, Niagara, Orleans, Genesee, and Wyoming counties did. 2 On Your Side asked infectious disease expert Dr. Thomas Russo about what this means for COVID-19 infection rates in Western New York.
"It's somewhat encouraging suggesting that we did a reasonable job here, at least in Erie County, in terms of not having an increase of close interactions, which we know is one of the critical factors for acquiring new coronavirus infection," Russo said. "It's interesting to see that there was an increase in the closeness factor in Niagara, Genesee, and Wyoming counties, and their test positivity rate has also been up over the last week or so, whereas we've been relatively flat here, in fact drifting a bit downward in Erie County."
Niagara County saw closeness increase by 11-percent.
"Individuals that end up getting hospitalized from new cases, and if that closeness data and test positivity translates into new cases, that will eventually translate into new hospitalizations," Russo said. "It's possible that may impact Erie County, though obviously those counties have their own hospitals and Intensive Care Unit beds as well."
Russo also noted that the cell phone data looked at people who were 50-feet away from each other's cell phones or closer.
"When you interpret the cell phone data, you always have to interpret it with a little bit of a grain of salt because it's not that granular, and I think they determine closeness by about 50 feet or so," he said.
Russo says, so far, he's pleasantly surprised by the case numbers in Erie County as far as any Thanksgiving surge goes. He also says we probably have about five to seven days to see the full impact of a Thanksgiving surge.