Some Idahoans are doing a good job staying home, tracking data shows. Except these places.

Hoping to slow the coronavirus pandemic, Idaho Gov. Brad Little issued a stay-at-home order last week.

But how many of us have truly hunkered down?

Idahoans in the majority of counties have failed to make shutdown-level travel changes, according to Unacast, a company that tracks and analyzes cellphone location data.

But some parts of the Gem State are doing a lot better than others.

Idaho gets an overall grade of D on Unacast’s Social Distancing Scoreboard, which was created to “help raise awareness of and reinforce the importance of social distancing.” The interactive map ranks states and counties based on how much residents have reduced their average mobility.

“There has been incredible inbound reaction to this,” spokesperson Jeanne Meyer said in a phone interview Wednesday, “and from all corners of society: academia, other data scientists, businesses, health institutions — you name it.”

Residents in Boise, Latah, Caribou and Valley counties have significantly cut back movement. They tied for the highest grade in Idaho: B.

Ada and Bannock counties get a B-.

Otherwise, Idahoans and their phones are having trouble staying put, Unacast’s GPS data indicates.

10 counties get an F

Counties receiving a C are Bonner, Bonneville, Bear Lake, Bennewah, Boundary, Franklin, Lewis, Lincoln, Teton and Washington. Blaine County, Idaho’s outbreak hotspot for COVID-19, gets a C-.

Racking up a D are Canyon, Nez Perce, Twin Falls, Adams, Clearwater, Idaho, Owyhee, Payette and Gem counties. Fremont, Madison, Minidoka, Jefferson, Bingham and Kootenai counties get a D-.

The rest of Idaho gets an F: Butte, Cassia, Custer, Gooding, Lemhi, Oneida, Power, Shoshone, Elmore and Jerome.

Camas and Clark counties did not have enough mobility data to be graded.

Earlier this week, Idaho had a B on the Social Distancing Scoreboard, which is updated daily. And Blaine County led the state with an A-. But Unacast raised the bar April 1. To get an A for distance traveled, a county now needs a 70 percent reduction since late February. Conversely, a reduction of less than 25 percent warrants an F.

“In Italy, the range of decrease in travel is 70 percent to 80 percent,” Unacast explains on its blog. “We thus chose 70 percent reduction in distance traveled as a model for what can be expected under a total shutdown. As of our recalibration, no U.S. state has yet achieved the new cut-off, but neither has any state chosen to go into a full quarantine as Italy.”

As part of the update, Unacast also added nonessential travel to its methodology, Meyer explained: “A change in how often you might be going to, say, a restaurant or a city park, which might be deemed nonessential. Whereas a pharmacy might be deemed essential.”

No state has an overall grade of A in the rankings. Michigan, New York, Minnesota, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., have an A-.

Rural areas, party affiliation

Logic dictates that people would be more diligent about social distancing in places feeling the impact hardest. Ada and Blaine counties — home to Boise and Ketchum — have the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Ada has a B- on the Social Distancing Scoreboard; Blaine had an A- one day ago, before an uptick in nonessential visits lowered its grade in the April 1 update.

It’s also unsurprising that people in rural areas are less likely to stay put, said Philip Martin, a UC Davis professor emeritus who studies rural and agricultural economies. Far from large companies, and government and health care centers, rural residents are much less likely to have the sorts of white-collar office jobs that give them the option to telecommute.

Many of the sorts of jobs that drive rural regional economies also have been deemed “essential services” by the government, so workers can travel to work while the rest of the state is asked to quarantine.

“I think you could safely say ... the rural and agricultural counties, there’s probably a higher share of essential workers, and so we would expect people to go to their jobs,” Martin told the Sacramento Bee.

Rural residents deciding to venture out also might feel they’re less likely to encounter someone carrying the virus. “It may be a real or a false confidence,” Martin said.

In analysis done by the Bee, the same correlation showed up for party affiliation; California counties with a high proportion of Democrats tended to reduce distance traveled more than counties with a high proportion of Republicans.

Last month, national polling also showed that Republicans were less likely to take the coronavirus as seriously as Democrats, though those numbers have risen substantially since President Donald Trump declared a national emergency and conservative media outlets like Fox News changed their tune about the virus threat.

Experts warn that any sense of security of small towns being protected from COVID-19 may be misleading. They say the rural communities with small medical facilities could be among the hardest hit in a surge.

Looking to the future

The Social Distancing Scoreboard is the result of 25 data scientists hoping to help mitigate the pandemic, Meyer said.

Smartphone users’ personal privacy was not compromised by the GPS data, she added. “Unacast’s day job is they are in the business of providing data insights to primarily retail and real estate companies. All the data they can deliver is anonymized and aggregated, so in no way would they be able to drill down to an individual.”

Even when the pandemic ends, Meyer said, the Social Distancing Scoreboard might not.

“Down the road, there is a belief that businesses will want this type of information as a way to forecast ways to recover their business and come back,” she said. “When it’s time to pick up the pieces, this data is going to be useful, right?”

McClatchy News Service contributed to this article.

This story was originally published April 1, 2020 at 3:49 PM.