It seems Americans didn’t need much encouragement to start leaving their homes again and heading back out into public areas. Cellphone data analyzed by TheNew York Times reportedly shows that, on average, 25 million more Americans left their homes each day last week compared to the preceding six weeks. The average share of people staying home stood at just over 36 percent, which is said by researchers to be a drop of over 7 percentage points from the average during the peak period for sheltering in place. The surge came as more than half of U.S. states started to reopen their economies or began making plans to do so—even though public-health experts have repeatedly warned that the reopenings will likely cause fresh spikes of infections and deaths. The Times reports the share of people staying home last week dropped in nearly every part of the nation, in some places by nearly 11 percentage points.
