The effect of population mobility restrictive measures on the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the early phase of the pandemic

  1. Luis Gustavo Modelli de Andrade
  2. Gustavo Fernandes Ferreira
  3. Helio Tedesco-Silva

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Abstract

Background

This analysis aims to assess the association between population restrictive measures and the cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the early phase of pandemic.

Methods

We compared mobility data extracted from the Mobility Reports provided by Google with the cumulative number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 of 15 countries provided by John Hopkins University. We compered the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases before and after the peak effect (PE) of population mobility restrictions in each country, defined as the highest percent reduction in mobility measurements.

Results

Time to PE of population mobility restrictions ranged between 16 and 45 days after the report of the index COVID-19 confirmed case in each country. The most frequent reductions in activities were retail & recreation, parks, and transit & stations, ranging from 30% to 90%. Despite this variability in PE among the countries, the predicted smooth effect after the PE of population mobility restrictions was observed in almost all countries.

Conclusions

These data suggest that the reduction in mobility was associated with a decrease in the cumulative total number of COVI-19 cases in each country, underscoring that the use of widely available real-time surveillance data might be a valuable resource during this pandemic.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.13.21255382: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    We analyzed with R version 3.6.3 [11] with the packages ggplot2, mgcv, and stanarm.
    ggplot2
    suggested: (ggplot2, RRID:SCR_014601)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.04.13.21255382v1 on medRxiv