Kansas Uses Cellphone Location Data Tool to Track COVID-19

Source: Gov Tech Published: April 2, 2020

Kansas is taking advantage of a recently launched platform that uses cellphone data to track the whereabouts of state residents in the hopes of further containing the coronavirus, officials announced last week.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) is using a "Social Distancing" dashboard recently launched by Unacast, a location data and analytics firm, that uses phone GPS data to illustrate the spread of the virus.

The data, which is anonymized and aggregated, can show at a county level whether residents are basically abiding by local stay-at-home orders or not. The data, which updates on a daily basis, is synthesized from a number of different sources, including public data and data that the company has previously purchased from other vendors, said a company representative.

The dashboard also rates communities with an A-F rating on how well they are practicing social distancing and staying away from "non-essential" outdoors venues, like stores, hotels and restaurants.

“We have to uniformly, across the state of Kansas, get serious about this to decrease the amount of travel we’re doing and stay home," said Dr. Lee Norman, the head of KDHE, at a joint press conference with Gov. Laura Kelly Wednesday. "We’re trying very hard to bend this curve, but we can’t do that if Kansans don’t cooperate.”