A team of researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities have created a computer model that predicts how COVID-19 spreads in cities by studying anonymized cellphone data from 98 million Americans in 10 major cities. The new research comes at a time when new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are surging across the country and cities have struggled to quell the virus’s spread — shutdown and reopening plans have varied and had varying degrees of success as local officials have struggled to balance health risks with economic losses. “What our model can do is start to inform the public and policymakers on where we fall on this tradeoff, and how many visits and how many infections would occur at each level of reopening,” Serina Chang, the co-first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, told ABC News.
