New data that ranks the pandemic recovery metrics for cities in the US by tracking the unique number of cellphones in the downtown region found that San Francisco has the slowest recovery rate of 63 US cities as of the spring, Breitbart News reported.
The data, compiled by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, is based on a sample of cellphone data and computed by tabulating the number of unique cell phones in each city’s downtown during a specific time. This is then divided by the number of unique cell phones in downtown areas during the same period in 2019 before the COVID pandemic hit.
A city with a recovery metric of 100 percent means that the cell phone activity during the post-pandemic period examined matches that of the same period in 2019. A metric exceeding 100 percent means that there was an increase in cell phone activity in the post-pandemic period measured. If the metric is below 100 percent, it means that the city’s downtown still has not recovered to 2019 cell phone activity levels.
Data compiled on 63 US cities during the spring of 2023 (March-May) found that Salt Lake City, Utah ranked number one, with a recovery metric of 139 percent. Coming in dead last, however, is San Francisco, with a recovery metric of only 32 percent.
Not every California city is struggling to reach the same level of activity as in 2019. Coming in second place by the spring of 2023 was Bakersfield, California, with a recovery metric of 128 percent. Fresno, California came in third with a recovery metric of 116 percent.
The only other city to exceed 100 percent by the spring was El Paso, Texas with a recovery metric of 107 percent
Cleveland, Ohio was second-to-last with a recovery metric of 36 percent. Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, came in 61 out of 63 with a recovery metric of 37 percent.
