Economic Fallout From COVID-19 Continues To Hit Lower-Income Americans the Hardest
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Just a few types of locations. KQED science reporter Danielle Benton has more from a recent study out of Stanford. Location services are enabled on, say, your weather app. Your phone shares information about where you go on how long you're there. Whenever you leave the house and self interest are restaurants, jeans, grocery stores, places of worship. This data is anonymous ized and used by researchers like you're a less Kovic, Stanford computer scientist. He and others recently modeled how people's outings drove the course of the epidemic in the 10 biggest US metropolitan areas. When New York you had a huge spike and people state a common dividers die down. Philadelphia, San Francisco was up and then kind of flat. Researchers could also infer which types of locations were responsible for the most transmissions. Before there were widespread health safety precautions. There is a very small number off places about let's say 10%, where 85% of full infections happened. Indoors. Sit down. Restaurants, cafes and gyms are the top three. Crowded businesses also increased risk there, especially a problem in low income neighborhoods. And you found out that even a trip to a grocery store is twice as 3 FT. For an individual from a low income neighborhood versus individual from high income neighborhood. Residents of poor neighborhoods are also more likely to work, low wage service jobs that can't be done online. One of the big achievements of this study is to highlight the occupational vulnerability that People on the lowest ends of our occupational structure have had to face Merlin Chow Kwan Yin's studies public health at Columbia and was not involved in this work. He says. It highlights how important temporary income assistance could be for people who cannot afford to stay home. The study also shows that tapping a businesses peak capacity can slash transmission while cutting overall foot traffic by only a small amount. I'm Danielle Benton KQED news. Now we're going to