In April, more people stayed home in Brazil, Japan, and Singapore as the novel cases of coronavirus in those countries exploded, while people in the United States and Australia returned to parks and jobs as infection rates flattened, Google data has indicated.
The new weekly analysis of Google’s aggregated travel trends obtained from the phones of its users revealed increased disobedience with lockdown orders in effect since March yet increasing compliance with those released last month.
The results, released online late Thursday by the Alphabet unit, compared daily traffic to retail and recreational venues, parks, train and bus stations, grocery stores, and workplaces within a five-week period from January 3 to February 6.
Singapore had supposedly regulated the spread of coronavirus by stringent contact surveillance and monitoring, but the nation-state went into lockdown on April 7, after outbreaks in migrant workers’ dormitories.
On the first weekend of April, retail and park visits in Singapore dropped about 25 percent. Through the final weekend of April, visits dropped by about 70 percent. Workplace visits went down by just 20 percent in early April then sunk by almost 70 percent last week.
U.S. officials cautioned against returning to normal too fast, but data from Google revealed that traffic to workplaces was creeping back up. The states of the South and Midwest were leading the way in the resumption of more typical patterns.
Epidemiologists had predicted fatigue from the lockdowns, with fears growing that as the weather warmed, more residents would resist shelter-in-place orders. Additionally, infection levels in certain areas have stabilized, leading governors to relax lockdowns over the past week.
Visits to transit, offices, and entertainment centers in Australia plummeted 80 percent in mid-April but rebounded in late April as new cases decreased.
The Panthera Post 