The New York Times’ opinion section published a visualization of how people engage with different businesses like bars and gyms. Warning that’through the lens of contagion, a yoga class, a busy corner store, or a crowded neighborhood bar may look a lot like a wet market in China’.

The story does n’t include any infection data. It does n’t say much about whether your local bar can avoid serving coronavirus with its Coronas.

Four professors at the University of Chicago aggregated anonymized phone location data from April of 2019. Using that data, they plotted how people flowed through locations that corresponded to businesses. They learned which kinds of stores saw customers linger the longest, which drew the biggest crowds.

The new coronavirus is spreading through the US. Several states have made emergency declarations. The World Health Organization has declared it a pandemic.

Denny’s and the original pancake house served similar numbers of people for similar amounts of time. People stayed twice as long at electronics stores as lawn and garden stores.

Many businesses have either been closed for weeks or drastically altered their operations. Data from a year ago might tell us very little about the future or future.

We do n’t know if they reflect how post-pandemic consumers will behave. People might maintain those old browsing styles, but they might also consciously avoid lingering anywhere.

Times editorial co-opts it for businesses that might be risky compared to other stores and restaurants. It does this without using hard data to establish how much each of its risk factors practically matters. We have no idea how good the assumptions of this model are.

There’s not a precise risk assessment right now for different densities and exposure times. Countries’ rapidly-expanding contact tracing programs can help solve the mystery.

mis-evaluating Red Lobster’s pandemic fitness is less pernicious than, say, promoting drugs that do n’t work. But it’s bad to pitch simple conclusions as policy recommendations when they’re backed up by so little evidence and so much speculation.

A pre-print research paper with flashy graphics appeared to show a vast miasmatic breath cloud. The paper was an aerodynamic simulation that did n’t establish whether the air could actually infect bystanders. But it was still widely shared with warnings against exercising outside.

Critics have cautioned against overemphasizing high-tech solutions to the disease. The Times itself warned that putting too much stock in tracking data might simply’provide an opening for technologists to oversell what they do’.