Research published on social distancing and mobility; local sports stars join Public Health – Seattle & King County’s Stand Together. Stay Apart. campaign; new recovery sites open
Summary
New research shows decreases in mobility associated with social distancing policies. Local sports stars join Public Health – Seattle & King County’s Stand Together. Stay Apart. campaign to promote the importance of social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19. Two new COVID-19 recovery sites are now open.
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Public policies on social distancing correlated with mobility reductions
Researchers studied four US cities, including the Seattle metro-area, looking at the relationship between public policies encouraging social distancing and changes in mobility. They published the findings today in the scholarly journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
They found that public policies encouraging social distancing practices were correlated with a reduction in mobility in all four cities.
This analysis reinforces other recent studies that show people in our community are heeding public health directives to stay home and the spread of COVID-19 is slowing," said Dr. Jeff Duchin, Health Officer for Public Health – Seattle & King County. "But before we can feel comfortable relaxing social distancing measures, we need to further decrease transmission and have widespread testing availability and public health systems in place to quickly identify people who are infected and their close contacts to help them isolate and quarantine."