File photo
File photo
Residents in Northern Illinois are scoring low when it comes to practicing social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19, according to a recent study.
Unacast, an organization that specializes in the collection and analysis of GPS data, created and launched a social distancing scoreboard in March.
"In our initial phase, we used the U.S. county with the strongest reduction in distance traveled — our original metric — as a baseline for setting the grading system," Madeline Ngo, head of Unacast product and insights, told the Kane County Chronicle. "However, this soon proved to be problematic as travel distances were still decreasing in the U.S. and experts argued that more reductions were needed."
The scoreboard assigned a C grade for the entire state of Illinois, and graded a number of Northern Illinois counties the same or a little higher, according to the data.
Kane County, Cook County and DuPage County received a B, while Jo Daviess County, Stephenson County, Whiteside County and Ogle County were among the northern counties to be graded at D.