Midtown Sacramento is a ghost town. Not one blanket on Venice Beach. The chairlifts at Squaw Valley aren’t moving. A single car crosses the Bay Bridge.

The scenes, captured by web cameras and newspaper photographers’ lenses, highlight Californians’ incredible efforts to isolate themselves in response to local and state orders to stay home to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Now, for the first time, Californians know just how well they’re doing.

New York technology company Unacast last week launched a Social Distancing Scoreboard that compares how much people in each county in the United States traveled each day before and after the coronavirus outbreak. The scorecard is built off smartphone data that covers about 5 to 15 percent of people in each county in the United States.

Overall, California received high marks for reducing movement. Unacast data shows Californians reduced their average distance traveled by a whopping 48 percent from late February to March 22.

But the data shows wide variation between the state’s counties, with some barely reducing travel — if at all — and others reducing travel by more than 70 percent.

A Sacramento Bee review of Unacast data and demographic figures show that Californians in poor, rural areas are far less likely to have stayed put than those in wealthier, urban counties in response to calls to stay home and slow the spread of COVID-19.

Unacast data also shows that some regions heavily dependent on tourism — an industry not deemed an “essential service” — have effectively stopped most travel.

Topping the list of California counties where movement had slowed the most were Napa County, renowned for its wineries, and Mono County, isolated in the eastern Sierra and home to the Mammoth Mountain ski resort. Napa saw a 74 percent reduction in average distance traveled; Mono 66.

“There’s nobody out and about,” said Mono County Sheriff Ingrid Braun. “You can see it. Just driving through the town of Mammoth Lakes, a lot of our businesses have closed, just because there’s no tourists here.”

There are 8,132 people in Mammoth Lakes. Six coronavirus cases were reported last week in Mono County, and local officials have been urging visitors to stay away to prevent infected people from overwhelming their small hospital.

Among heavily-populated counties, people in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Santa Clara and Alameda counties all cut their average travel distance by at least 50 percent from late February to March 22. People in San Bernardino County, which has more landmass than any other county in the USA, lagged behind, reducing travel distance by 26 percent.

People in Sacramento County cut average travel distance by 42 percent, while people in Placer County and El Dorado counties managed even bigger cuts. People in Yolo County reduced travel distance by 24 percent.

Rural areas still traveling

Sparsely populated counties in the state’s rugged northeastern corner — Modoc, Siskiyou and Lassen — each received “F” grades from Unacast for people not staying put.

People in Lassen County reduced movement by 2 percent. People in Tehama, Siskiyou and Modoc Counties actually increased their movement slightly, the data show.

Former Tehama County supervisor Gregg Avilla, a 78-year-old retired teacher and farmer, said the data didn’t necessarily reflect what he saw as he drove through the county seat of Red Bluff Thursday to go pick up his tax returns. Tehama County is home to 63,463 people, a two-hour drive north on Interstate 5 from Sacramento.

“I think I only counted six people out and about,” he said. “There’s a lot less movement.”

But he said the data could reflect the reality that no positive tests for coronavirus had been reported yet.

“I think the minute it becomes more real by saying, ‘Hey, Tehama County has three cases of coronavirus,’ you’re going to see a lot less people moving around,” Avila said.

His assertion is backed up in the data.

Counties with more confirmed COVID-19 cases also tended to cut their average travel distance more than counties with few cases, The Bee’s analysis shows. That finding is consistent with Unacast’s own analysis.

“The more cases are confirmed, the greater the decrease in the average distance traveled on the county level,” company CEO Thomas Walle wrote in a recent post.

The findings that people in rural areas have been less likely to stay put are not surprising, said Philip Martin, a UC Davis professor emeritus who studies rural and agricultural economies.

Far from tech centers, large companies and government and healthcare centers, rural residents are much more likely not to have the sorts of white-collar office jobs that give them the option to telecommute.

Plus, he said, in rural parts of the state, many of the sorts of jobs that drive rural regional economies have been deemed “essential services” by the government so workers can travel to work while the rest of the state is asked to quarantine.

For instance, freight-hauling truck drivers, farmworkers, road construction crews, warehouse employees and grocery store clerks are all exempt from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to “shelter in place.”

“I think you could safely say ... the rural and agricultural counties, there’s probably a higher share of essential workers, and so we would expect people to go to their jobs,” Martin said.

Areas with Trump voters are traveling more

The Bee cross-referenced Unacast’s location data with 14 different social, economic and health metrics for each California county. The metrics included median age, population density, poverty, income, political affiliation and data on the number of COVID-19 cases reported so far. The analysis excluded the state’s two least-populated counties, Alpine and Sierra.

There were several statistically significant correlations, but the strongest was related to income. People in counties with high median household incomes and low poverty tended to show higher reductions in average distance traveled than other counties.

All of the state’s 15 wealthiest counties — as measured by median family income — reduced their average distance traveled by at least 45 percent from late February to March 22. The same could be said of only one of the state’s 15 poorest counties — Lake County.

Education levels also correlated closely with reductions in travel. Counties where a large proportion of residents hold a bachelor’s degree tended to cut travel more than areas where relatively few residents had a degree.

There was also a significant negative correlation between the proportion of Trump voters in a county and reduction in distance traveled.

Counties with a high proportion of Trump voters tended to cut their average distance traveled by less than voters in counties that went for Hillary Clinton.

Only one county — Amador —of the 15 counties with the highest proportion of residents voting for Trump cut their average distance traveled by at least 45 percent, compared to 11 of the counties with the lowest proportion of Trump voters.

The same correlation showed up for party affiliation; counties with a high proportion of Democrats tended to reduce distance traveled more than counties with a high proportion of Republicans.

Former Trinity County supervisor Roger Jaegel, a retired U.S. Forest Service worker who now lives in Redding, said the politics in his region could definitely be playing a role in some people’s decision not to follow the calls from media outlets and a Democratic governor to stay put.

In the rural, conservative counties, mistrust of the media and the Democratic state government is a cornerstone of local political ideology.

Earlier this month, national polling also showed that Republicans were less likely to take the coronavirus as seriously as Democrats, though those numbers have risen substantially since President Donald Trump declared a national emergency and conservative media outlets like Fox News changed their tune about the virus threat.

People feel secure traveling in rural areas

In 2016, 65 percent of Shasta County voters picked Donald Trump. Movement there had been reduced by just 19 percent.

But Jaegel thinks the data likely reflects other, more practical concerns in extremely rural places like his former home of Trinity County, a sprawling forested Northwestern California county encompassing 3,209 square miles and home to just 12,709 people.

According to Unacast, movement in Trinity has been reduced by just 16 percent.

“They have to travel either to the coast or Redding if they’re going to stock up on groceries,” Jaegel said. “The local markets have their clientele and they do fairly well, but I’ve seen on Facebook people just recently saying, ‘I need to go to Redding. I need to make a grocery run.’”

Rural residents deciding to venture out also could be tied feeling they’re less likely to encounter someone carrying the virus, said Martin, the UC Davis rural economy professor.

“People may have felt more secure in going out in the rural areas, if the crowds, the long lines at the grocery stores, were shorter.” Martin said. “In the urban areas, there well could be somebody who had been in Wuhan or had been in one of the cruise ships or whatever.”

“It may be a real or a false confidence.”

Experts warn that any sense of security of small towns being protected from COVID-19 may be misleading. They say the rural communities with small medical facilities could be among the hardest hit in a COVID-19 surge.

Many rural hospitals have just a handful of ventilators necessary to keep patients breathing, and they are particularly at risk of having a shortage of healthcare workers should they start to come down with symptoms of the disease.

Jeanne Meyer, a spokeswoman for Unacast, said the scorecard’s primary purpose is to spread the word about the importance of social distancing. She said Unacast officials are careful not to release data at a level that would compromise anyone’s privacy.

The data scientists at Unacast built the tool over the last weekend to “create something for the public good,” she said.

This story was originally published March 29, 2020 at 5:00 AM.