spring break coronavirus

This Map Shows How Far Coronavirus Could Have Spread After Spring Break

Everyone knows about the spring breakers who partied their way through Florida while the rest of us were starting to hunker down to flatten the curve and slow down the spread of coronavirus throughout America. We’ve made fun of them, called them careless and selfish, and nobody was surprised when reports started rolling in confirming at least several who returned home afterward have since tested positive for COVID-19.

But it’s one thing to know, logically, that these zoomers could easily have tracked coronavirus across the country, infecting numerous people along the way. It’s another to see what that actually looks like.

And now, a simulation created by Tectonix is giving us a sobering picture of just what that unrelenting drunk debauchery could have meant for the rest of the country.

Using anonymous location data points from cell phones, the company created a map that tracks the movement of people who were on a single beach in Fort Lauderdale during the two weeks of spring break and shows how they spread across the country over the remainder of March.

One party could have done a lot of damage.

We know that young adults converging in Florida to party in March generally aren’t from Florida, but here we can see just how quickly they scatter back across the country.

The visualization has people angry about spring break all over again.

One piece of good news is that the map only shows the movement of people, not the virus.

We don’t yet know how many people who popped down to Florida for spring break may have come in contact with or contracted COVID-19, but we can be reasonably sure it wasn’t every single one of them.

However, with over 100,000 confirmed cases in the United States and counting, we know that the disease spreads easily and rapidly, and it’s incredibly unlikely that we won’t hear more reports of people who were in Florida for spring break testing positive.

Seeing just how easily and how far coronavirus could spread from a single party is enough to convince just about anyone to stay home.

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