Violating Quarantine? Big Brother Is Watching

Social distancing is harder than you might think for some. Divorce filings are surging presumably because married couples aren’t used to spending this much ‘quality time’ together or dealing with coronavirus-related financial stress, and teenagers or other youth with too much energy to expend insist they will go mad.

Some think, or hope, it will all end in two weeks with Trump controversially suggesting that he wants things back to normal by Easter, but new computer modeling research from Harvard University warns that it may be necessary for social distancing measures maintained into 2022 in the U.S. barring the arrival of a vaccine or feasible drug therapies.

With the aggressive rise of cases across the United States — at last count, 61k300+ and 846 deaths, according to CNN — more aggressive quarantine measures could be put into place.

“This is because while a one-off period of social distancing might delay the peak of the outbreak until later this year, there is likely to be a resurgence in cases towards the end of the year if the virus shows some seasonal variation,” the paper said.

And it could be made worse by those who refuse to obey recommendations and even orders.

Despite the fact some states imposed stay-at-home order, people — mostly youth — continue to violate it. That has led some officials to propose rigorous measures against the violators, including jail time and fines.

Meanwhile, police forces are stretched to limit in trying to enforce these orders, but social media data is at least helping citizens check how people in their community are behaving.

It’s potentially a bit ‘Big Brother’, and eerily reminiscent of China’s ‘social media credit’ system except that it’s not pinpointing individuals — only states and counties. It’s also a nice bit of PR for the company behind the data dump.

Unacast, a location data and analytics firm, launched the Social Distancing Scoreboard showing mobility trends by county or by state. The Scorecard assigns a letter grade of A through F to all states and counties in relation to social distancing behavior.

Currently, the District of Columbia has a “A”, followed by Alaska, Nevada and New Jersey. The…