| No, they want to know because, in an emergency situation, you need to know how to contact people quickly without missing anyone. In the past, everyone had landlines, so if you had an outbreak of a serious disease in an area, you knew that you could call or robo-call all the numbers in a set of prefixes and have a good shot of reaching most of the population. However, as landline penetration drops, and as people move without changing their cell numbers, contacting people gets trickier. If you're going to either show that this is a problem or work to find a solution, you need accurate data on what kinds of phones people are using. That's why the CDC is doing this. |
