COVID-19 COMMUNITY MOBILITY REPORT

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Why in News?

  • Recently, Google has released ‘COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports’.

About Covid-19 Community Mobility Report:

  • It aims to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19.
  • It covers 131 countries and chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
  • It comes at a time when communities across the globe are looking at measures such as social distancing as a key action to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • It adopted technical measures to ensure that no individual could be identified through the new reports. The reports have been developed according to the company’s stringent privacy protocols and policies.
  • Google is an American search engine company founded in 1998 by Serge Brin and Larry Page. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.

About Finding Related to India:

  • In the wake of the March 22 ‘Janata Curfew’ and the subsequent ongoing 21-day nationwide lockdown, public movement had declined while movement in residential areas had increased. Its data is based on the 5-week period Jan 3–Feb 6, 2020 and the first few days of the lockdown period.
  • It shows that there has been a dip of 77% in mobility trends for places like restaurants, cafes, shopping centres and movie theatres and a 65% drop at grocery markets, food warehouses, farmers’ markets and pharmacies.
  • A 57% fall for places like public beaches and gardens, a 71% decline at public transport hubs and a 47% drop for places of work. But the mobility trends in the places of residence category showed an increase of 22%.
  • It will help support decisions about how to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the information could help officials understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings.

About Other Countries Around the World:

  • It compared traffic from Feb 16 to March 29 to retail and recreational venues, train and bus stations, grocery stores and workplaces with a five-week period (Jan 3- Feb 6).
  • Both Italy and Spain, two of the hardest-hit countries, both saw visits to retail and recreation locations such as restaurants and movie theaters fall 94%. The UnitedKingdom, France and Philippines had declines of more than 80%.
  • In Japan and Sweden, where authorities have not imposed harsh restrictions, visits to retail and recreation sites fell by roughly only a quarter.
  • In South Korea, which has successfully contained a large outbreak through aggressive testing and contact tracing, the decline was just 19%.
  • It has noreports for China and Iran, where Google Services are Blocked.
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