The number of daily trips per person — when a cellphone moved more than a mile from home — had hovered around 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels since rebounding over the summer. But by mid-February, after a slight slump amid a surge in new cases, the number regularly started to exceed pre-pandemic travel.
By the first week of March, the number of trips surpassed those taken each day in the same week last year, before stay-at-home orders kicked in, by as much as 13.6 percent.
With such orders having long expired and barely 10 percent of the country fully vaccinated, Americans are demonstrating a growing comfort with heading out, likely the result of declines in new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths, researchers said. Reaching the first anniversary of pandemic-related restrictions might also have created more severe cases of early spring fever, experts say.
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