Google reveals how countries reacted to coronavirus lockdowns

Since the appearance of the new Coronavirus, a substantial part of the world has been forced to lock down and maintain strict social distancing.

However, the questions remain: did people do enough? Did they actually stay inside their homes during the lockdown period? If not, where did more go? Well, if it was during the 1918 pandemic, we may not be able to answer these important questions.

But thanks to the technological advances of the XNUMXst century, scientists and researchers can obtain relevant data to answer the questions. And Google has stepped up to provide this crucial data.

Google reveals how countries reacted to coronavirus lockdowns

Google's Android platform and its services have become essential elements in our daily lives. While people use these services to make their lives easier, Google uses them as a great source of data. Now, the Mountain View-based tech giant has released a massive pool of "Community Mobility Reports" from hundreds of countries, suggesting how these countries reacted to lockdowns.

At blog From Google, we read a set of anonymous information from Google Maps to help public health officials make critical decisions to combat COVID-19. These reports contain user movement data from most countries where the blocking protocol so far. The company took a large chunk of this data and put it into location categories.

These categories include:

1. Retail and recreation
2. Groceries and Pharmacies
3. Parks (national parks, local gardens and beaches)
4. transit stations
5. Work places
6. Residential

After mapping the data in the above location categories, the company compared these to its "baseline days." This was to show how visitors to categorized places change after lockdowns at each place.

Now, a reference day means a "normal value" for a day of the week. In this case, Google took the mean value of the time period from January 3 to February 6 as the "reference days" since no major events occurred during this time.

According to Google, this data could help researchers, scientists, epidemiologists, and health officials in crucial ways. By analyzing the reports, they can come up with new and better strategies to combat the pandemic. And we know that officials are already working on a new lockdown format, fearing a relapse of the disease in many countries.

So if you are a research specialist or someone who may think you can make use of reports, you can find the dataset and analyze it. This data will not be available forever as the company claims that:

“These reports will be available for a limited time, as long as public health officials find them useful in their work to stop the spread of COVID-19”.