Humans can’t sit still, not for long anyway. Even when one is watching TV or working in office, you do end up getting up once in while (not just for bathroom visits). And nor can human remain locked up in one place without having to move out of the house at least once in day. The call of the outside world is too strong to ignore in some people. And this lockdown, owing to the global outbreak of coronavirus, has not brought a stop to in-house movement, it has definitely put a stop to stepping out of the house. You can only step out to buy essentials, visit a pharmacy or hospital in emergencies or your workplace if you fall under the Indian government’s excluded-from-lockdown list.
Keeping this in mind, and make the work easier for health organisation, tech giant Google released a COVID-19 Community Mobility Report. This report will make easier understand of how social distancing and stay-at-home measures are working out and which areas continue to be busy.
Google’s report shows Indians have moved out of their homes less compared to the worst-hit United States. The report shows, in India, there is a 65% drop in visits to grocery stores, food warehouses, farmers’ markets and pharmacies, a 57% fall for places like public beaches and gardens and a 47% drop for places of work. However, the mobility trends in the places of residence category showed an increase of 22%.
While in United States, there has been a dip of 47% in mobility trends for places like restaurants, cafes, shopping centres and movie theatres, a 22% drop at grocery markets, food warehouses, farmers’ markets and pharmacies, a 19% fall for places like public beaches and gardens.
The reports also states that the United Kingdom, France and Philippines showed decline of more than 80% while India, which went into a sudden 21-day lockdown on March 25, was also notable at 77%. In the United States, where state responses have varied greatly, the drops was less steep at 47%. Italy and Spain, two of the hardest-hit countries, both saw visits to retail and recreation locations, such as restaurants and movie theatres, plunge 94%.
The ‘COVID-19 Community Mobility Report’ by Google covers 131 countries and regions, and uses aggregated, anonymised data to chart movement trends over time by geography, across different high-level categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
While observing that the report “aims to provide insights into what has changed in response to work from home, shelter in place, and other policies aimed at flattening the curve of this pandemic” Google, however, added no detailed explanations for the changes in the mobility patterns recorded, which are based on users’ location history data.
The baseline used to calculate the mobility trend was “the median value, for the corresponding day of the week, during the 5-week period Jan 3–Feb 6, 2020”, and captured the first few days of the lockdown period.
