New data from the Census Bureau revealed how much changed in Montgomery County during the pandemic, including how people worked and commuted. Kasturi Pananjady and Aseem Shukla encapsulated the local new-normal for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The American Community Survey sampled a representative group of U.S. residents annually and extrapolated those results to the entire population. The latest numbers measure life in 2021, which can be compared with data from 2019 to reveal levels of change over the initial years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, the number of people working from home skyrocketed in 2021 to 28.6 percent. That is more than one in four employees working from home.

The number of residents using public transportation more than halved in the 2019–2021 timeframe, dropping from more than four percent to under two percent.

Meanwhile, Montgomery County saw its inequality values (how evenly income or income growth is distributed across the population) increase slightly from 0.461 in 2019 to 0.464 in 2021.

This data point was measured by the Gini coefficient, which summarizes the dispersion of income across the entire income distribution.

Also, the suburbs saw an increase in educated people who left the region.

In 2019, 103,400 college graduates relocated from the Phila. collar counties. That number rose to 123,000 in 2021.

Read more about Census Bureau data illustrating Montgomery County’s post-pandemic changes in The Philadelphia Inquirer.