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by OrangeMango 2220 days ago
Just in the first 3 paragraphs of the article:

> ...An analysis of multiple sources of aggregated smartphone location data has found.

You need a smartphone and apps/settings that enable aggregation of location data. This is not something that is going to be evenly distributed throughout the city. Further, that is likely to be primarily advertising data, so quality is less than you would desire. How many people are going to be counted twice when you merge this data together?

> Roughly 5 percent of residents — or about 420,000 people — left the city between March 1 and May 1.

That's not a lot of people for NYC.

> Some of these areas are typically home to lots of students, many of whom left as colleges and universities closed

There are nearly 600,000 college students in NYC[1]. That's more than the number of people that left!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_New_York_City

2 comments

From the same article: "In the city’s very wealthiest blocks, in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, residential population decreased by 40 percent or more, while the rest of the city saw comparably modest changes."

The point of the article is that the vast majority of people leaving were from area s of concentrated wealth. 40% is a large number of people leaving.

A lot of those students are probably CUNY ones which don't live in dorms, and would have no place to "return" to.