Smartphone data shows out-of-state visitors flocked to Georgia as restaurants and other businesses r
Source: WaPo
One week after Georgia allowed dine-in restaurants, hair salons and other businesses to reopen, an additional 62,440 visitors arrived there daily, most from surrounding states where such businesses remained shuttered, according to an analysis of smartphone location data.
Researchers at the University of Maryland say the data provides some of the first hard evidence that reopening some state economies ahead of others could potentially worsen and prolong the spread of the novel coronavirus. Any impetus to travel, public health experts say, increases the number of people coming into contact with each other and raises the risk of transmission.
“It's exactly the kind of effects we've been worried about,” said Meagan Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“This is not an unpredictable outcome with businesses opening in one location and people going to seek services there,” said Fitzpatrick, who has reviewed the findings by the university's Maryland Transportation Institute.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/smartphone-data-shows-out-of-state-visitors-flocked-to-georgia-as-restaurants-and-other-businesses-reopened/2020/05/06/b1db0056-8faf-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main
= new reply since forum marked as read
...and immediately there was an influx of Pennsylvanians crossing over to West Virginia and Ohio to purchase liquor in those stores where individual retails owners could decide whether to stay open or close.
Immediately there was an outpouring of resentment by the local residents towards PA people crossing the state border, so what did they do? Instead of sensibly closing their liquor stores (since they were nonessential) the neighbor states required every customer to show a WV driver's license to purchase in West Virginia, or an OH license to purchase in Ohio.
Of course this is going to happen everywhere. People from out of state are coming to you, if you choose to ignore the quarantine. Isn't this the reason why you're doing it? Why else would you take the risk? No place - and no person - is safe until we have an effective vaccine.
We have state-run liquor stores that control the sale of wine and spirits. However for nearly 100 years beer can be sold through private retail beer distributors and breweries (by the case or keg) and also private bar/tavern owners are allowed to sell 6-packs of beer to take out.
We are literally the last state in the Union to change this setup that's a holdover from the end of Prohibition Era in 1933. So we haven't gone completely retail yet, but we're slowly moving away from state control of liquor sales into retail sales. It has taken a lot of legislation to get this far! A few grocery store chains have applied for and received licenses to sell beer and wine - that was a major step for us almost 10 years ago. Eventually there will be privately owned retail liquor stores (and the PA state stores will slowly close) but we're not there yet, and now this pandemic happened.
I think the pandemic has made everyone realize what a PITA it is to have one entity (namely our governor) who makes a decision to close everything in one fell swoop. We went from everything open to nothing open in a matter of days.
It's a throwback to ending the corruption of the Prohibition Era. There was a LOT of it in Pennsylvania, as I have learned. Gangsters, mobsters, bootleggers, crooked politicians, corrupt cops, we had it all here.
Now we have State Stores. Not corrupt, but horribly inefficient and unresponsive to the market.
packing restaurants and other businesses. In the middle of a pandemic.
What could possibly go wrong?
