Alphabet Inc’s Google on Thursday published reports for 131 countries showing whether visits to shops, parks and workplaces dropped last month, when many governments issued stay-at-home orders to rein in the spread of COVID-19.
Google’s analysis of location data from billions of users’ phones is the largest public dataset available to help health authorities assess if people are abiding with shelter-in-place and similar orders issued across the world.
Its reports show charts that compare traffic from Feb. 16 to Sunday at subway, train and bus stations, grocery stores and other broad categories of places with a five-week period earlier this year.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by the virus, visits to retail and recreation locations, including restaurants and movie theaters, plunged 94 percent, while visits to workplaces slid 63 percent.
Reflecting the severity of the crisis there, grocery and pharmacy visits in Italy dropped 85 percent and park visits were down 90 percent.
In the US, California, which was the first to impose a statewide lockdown, cut visits to retail and recreation locations by half. By contrast, Arkansas, one of the few states without a sweeping lockdown, has seen such visits fall 29 percent, the lowest for a US state.
The data also underscore some challenges authorities have faced in keeping people apart. Grocery store visits surged in Singapore, the UK and elsewhere, as travel restrictions were set to go into place. Visits to parks spiked last month in some San Francisco Bay Area counties, forcing them to later put the sites off limits.
By contrast, in Japan, where authorities have been relatively relaxed in urging social distancing measures, but where calls have been growing daily for a state of emergency, visits to retail and recreational places fell 26 percent. Visits to workplaces dropped a mere 9 percent.
The novel coronavirus has infected more than 1 million people globally and has killed 52,000, according to a Reuters tally.
Facebook Inc, which like Google has billions of users, has shared location data with non-governmental researchers that are producing similar reports for authorities in several countries. However, the social media giant has not published any findings.
Infectious disease specialists have said analyzing travel across groups by age, income and other demographics could help shape public service announcements.
Google, which infers demographics from users’ Internet use as well as some data given when signing up to Google services, said it was not reporting demographic information.
However, the company said it was open to including additional information and countries in follow-up reports.
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