Title:	#STAYHOME: MONITORING SOCIAL DISTANCING TRENDS IN AMAZONAS DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC USING GOOGLE MOBILE DATA
Author(s):	Patricia Endo, Gisliany Lillian Alves de Oliveira, Luciana Conceição de Lima, Ivanovitch Silva, Guto Leoni and Theo Lynn
ISBN:	978-989-8704-26-9
Editors:	Piet Kommers and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2021
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	COVID-19, Coronavirus Pandemic, Google Mobile Data, Social Distancing, Health Surveillance
Type:	Full
First Page:	23
Last Page:	29
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Controlling COVID-19 poses significant disease control challenges due to its contagiousness and uncertain infectivity of asymptomatic and clinically mild cases. Uninfected and silent carriers contributed significantly to the spread of the disease. For most of 2020, no strain-specific control options were available and consequently non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies were typically used by Governments worldwide for disease control. The COVID-19 pandemic is the first time that the social, mobile, cloud, and big data technologies could be exploited en masse to inform decision making on a local and global scale. This paper examines the public response to policies adopted by the State of Amazonas in Brazil using Google Mobile Community Report data. Our analysis suggests that while public did response to government public health interventions, there is clear evidence of a decline in adherence from April onwards resulting in a further spike in cases and deaths in September. The analysis suggests that mobile data is a useful and low-cost proxy for social distancing adherence that can help to inform both regional and local public health interventions. It also suggests that policymakers must consider measures to counter declines in adherence when designing such policies, and consider what actions can be taken to encourage access, adoption and use of mobile data for public health surveillance while addressing concerns about data privacy and data protection.
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