Not enough traces

Whistlerwitch

I live and play in the downtown core of a decently sized city (approximately 2 million people). My home is surrounded by inns and there is a park with a fortress, 2 inns and 2 greenhouses two blocks away. The first 2 or 3 days after Wizards Unite launched I would see a reasonable spawn of traces, something similar to the spawn of Pokemon near my home. For the past week, however, the trace spawn has slowed to a crawl. I walk my dog for around an hour total each day. Recently I have only seen 4-6 traces spawn. We walked for 53 minutes straight on Saturday, and during that walk only 5 traces appeared. I logged 6km of walking that day, and was unable to complete the "Return 10 confoundables" daily task because I only interacted with 9 confoundables. This is a ridiculously low spawn rate. My friend lives in a rural area and has four or five traces spawn at her house every time she opens the app! What's going on? I have tried logging out and logging back into the app several times, but it has not made any difference. Is anyone else having this problem? I submitted a bug report on this issue to Niantic a few days ago, and I am hoping to see a change for the better with the next update.