Gravy Analytics’ new COVID- 19 Economic Activity Dashboards illustrate the impact of COVID-19 and social distancing implementation on changing foot traffic patterns across the United States.

It’s no secret that for most of the world, travel habits have changed significantly over the last few months. As some areas continue to enforce strict lockdowns and others cautiously start to reopen their doors, more scrutiny than ever is being paid to how people are traveling within their communities. Now, a new dashboard from Gravy Analytics is using real location data to make that picture even clearer for researchers and decision-makers, showing how American consumers’ travel habits are changing as the global crisis evolves.

Gravy Analytics was founded in 2011 just outside Washington, D.C. Since then, the firm has been crunching away at massive amounts of data – tens of billions of location signals – to understand trends in human mobility and consumer behavior. “When the COVID crisis hit, we understood that obviously human mobility had a large part to play,” said Jeff White, founder and CEO of Gravy Analytics, in an interview with Datanami. “Not only in understanding the virus’ progression, but ultimately in how we cope with it, how we leverage it to save lives and ultimately get back to some level of normalcy as quick as we can.”

So the team at Gravy built a dashboard – not a dashboard tracking COVID cases or hospital beds, but a dashboard tracking movement. Gravy’s dashboard charts the trends of in-person visits to 200 different retail and restaurant chains across the country, setting it apart from tools like Apple’s Mobility Trends tool, which seek to show movement trends during the pandemic by displaying overall changes in routing requests.

The data in the dashboard is broken down by either state or major city (50 are available, for now), and can be viewed either in terms of specific brands (e.g. AMC Theatres or Petco) or categories (e.g. movie theaters or pet stores). The dashboard reaches back to early February and is regularly updated.