Vacation hot spots surged during holiday weekend
People at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks drew a scolding from across the internet Memorial Day weekend after images of shoulder-to-shoulder partiers in a swimming pool went viral. The lakefront wasn’t the only place to draw a huge influx of holiday visitors to its hotels, restaurants and stores. A USA TODAY analysis of cellphone data found about 400 ZIP codes where foot traffic at businesses more than doubled from the previous weekend. The data, supplied by location data company SafeGraph, included the first two days of the long holiday weekend. Although the data can’t tell whether people clumped together in ways on display at Lake of the Ozarks, it shows the drive to recreate was widespread. The list of hot spots was filled with waterfront resort towns, national landmarks and destination casinos spread from Lake Erie to the Grand Canyon, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, from Lake George in upstate New York to inland lakes in the South. Almost a third of the 400 ZIP codes actually received more foot traffic than on Memorial Day 2019, long before anyone dreamed of an illness called COVID-19. All but three states – Connecticut, Delaware and Massachusetts – had at least one ZIP code with a massive increase in business visitors. “Clearly, there were many, many people who just threw off the halter and decided they were not going to do any semblance of social distancing, at least for that weekend,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease doctor and professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “These are the circumstances that COVID-19 looks forward to.” Other health experts warned that the movement of people from cities to smaller resort towns risked fresh outbreaks. Most of the counties with Memorial Day hot spots reported comparatively low infection rates as of Friday before the holiday, according to USA TODAY’s database of coronavirus case counts. In the majority of the 19,000 U.S. ZIP codes for which reliable cellphone data was available, foot traffic to businesses