The Homa Files

And, how risky is it to have contact with people outside of your household?
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In a previous post, we reported a Gallup survey that indicated at least.2/3s of Americans were making a reasonably serious attempt to isolate themselves during the stay-at-home.

• See: How strictly are you complying to stop the spread?

A new Gallup survey reports that 74% are isolating themselves “completely” or “mostly”.

That’s pretty good compliance.

And, Gallup goes a step further in the current study to calibrate what “completely” or “mostly” mean by asking respondents how many people they came in contact with — not counting fellow household members — during the past 24 hours.

Note: The forecast models generally assume that social distancing practices, including stay-at-home, reduce contacts by about 40% … 25% for work contacts and 75% for general social contacts.

The conclusion: Adults practicing social distancing generate at least 90% fewer contacts per day than those who are making little effort to social distance.

On average, survey respondents had 9.9 contacts in the past 24 hours.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the numbers…

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The average is 9.9 contacts, but there’s a wide range: complete isolaters only had 1.5 outside contacts …  those who are only isolating a little or not at all had about 50 contacts each day.

Understandably, people who are still working (60% of the sample) had more outside contacts (13.9) than non-workers (4.0) who are better positioned to stay isolated.

Predictably, the bulk of the outside contacts are at work (52% of contacts), at a grocery store (26%) and with visitors to the home (8%).

All of these numbers make sense to me.  They still signal good compliance … and they provide a baseline for statistically assessing the risk that we incur when we venture out of our homes.

We’re working on that angle now..

This entry was posted on April 25, 2020 at 10:00 am and is filed under Coronavirus - Covid 19. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.