Social distancing report card: Which South Carolina counties are doing the best?

When it comes to social distancing, South Carolina is doing well compared to most states, scoring a “B” for its efforts to flatten the curve of coronavirus cases, according to a new study.

The company Unacast used data from people’s mobile devices to track movement. Scores are based on how well a given state’s residents have been staying put since COVID-19 started spreading throughout the United States.

South Carolinians were traveling 37% less by March 23, the study found. But some counties are doing better than others.

Six S.C. counties earned an “A” grade: Greenville, York, Abbeville, Horry, Beaufort, and Charleston.

Charleston County residents slashed their travel by 52 percent, according to the study.

Charleston and Horry counties are among the hardest hit financially by the coronavirus, as their local economies depend heavily on tourism. Unemployment claims in South Carolina spiked by over 30,000 last week, and the two counties combined accounted for more than 9,000 of those claims, The State reported.

No counties earned an “F,” but five got a “D” grade: Jasper, Colleton, Marlboro, Dillon and Cherokee.

Dillon and Cherokee residents only curbed their travel habits by 15%, according to the study.

While the study relied on GPS tracking data from personal devices, Unacast said the anonymity of those tracked was not compromised.

“The Social Distancing Scoreboard and other tools being developed for the Covid-19 Toolkit do not identify any individual person, device, or household,” according to Unacast. “However to calculate the actual underlying social indexing score we combine tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day - and then extrapolate the results to the population level.”

The top five states in the study were Washington, D.C., Nevada, New Jersey, Vermont and Massachusetts.

Wyoming was the only state that got an “F.”

This story was originally published March 26, 2020 at 11:33 AM with the headline "Social distancing report card: Which South Carolina counties are doing the best?."