A Tale of Two Cities: preliminary evidence that social distancing as practiced in the US works

Andy Slavitt ran the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, i.e. CMS, for Obama.  He led the team that repaired healthcare.gov when they had problems rolling out Obamacare.  He's got some real time data on the type of social distancing that has been employed in the US, and it is encouraging.  He was interviewed by Preet Bharara, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York until he was fired by Trump: 

"But we just did some real time data.  We took a look at two locations, Santa Clara California, and Miami Dade Florida.  The reason we looked at those two cities is because Santa Clara and San Francisco and that area put into place some very strict stay at home, #stayhome, rules and messaging, and Miami Dade was, to be kind, a little more lax, a little more late to it.  And we looked at the data. 

The data we looked at was real time temperature data from people's thermometers that load to the cloud.  And we compared it to average temperatures you'd expect during 'flu season.  And we graphed decisions that were made politically, such as closing bars and restaurants, closing schools, having people stay home, and we saw sharp drops in the number of cases with this disease in Santa Clara compared to Florida."

The data is from Kinsa, a company that sells smart thermometers.  According to a NY Times article

"Can Smart Thermometers Track the Spread of the Coronavirus" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/health/coronavirus-fever-thermometers.html

"Kinsa Health has sold or given away more than a million smart thermometers to households in which two million people reside, and thus can record fevers almost as soon as consumers experience them.

For the last few years, Kinsa’s interactive maps have accurately predicted the spread of flu around the United States about two weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own surveillance tool, the weekly FluView tracker"

They have years of data on what to expect to see.  Covid-19 is new.  Subtract what you expect to see from their data and you may be looking at Covid-19 fevers. 

"Just last Saturday, Kinsa’s data indicated an unusual rise in fevers in South Florida, even though it was not known to be a Covid-19 epicenter. Within days, testing showed that South Florida had indeed become an epicenter."

The interview of Slavitt conducted by Preet Bharara is from the "Tracking and Tackling COVID-19" episode of the "Stay Tuned with Preet" podcast.