Monitoring social distancing and SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Brazil using cell phone mobility data

  1. Silvano Barbosa de Oliveira
  2. Victor Bertollo Gomes Pôrto
  3. Fabiana Ganem
  4. Fabio Macedo Mendes
  5. Maria Almiron
  6. Wanderson Kleber de Oliveira
  7. Francieli Fontana Sutile Tardetti Fantinato
  8. Walquiria Aparecida Ferreira de Almeida
  9. Abel Pereira de Macedo Borges
  10. Hector Natan Batista Pinheiro
  11. Raíza dos Santos Oliveira
  12. Jason R. Andrews
  13. Nuno R Faria
  14. Marcelo Barreto Lopes
  15. Wildo Navegantes de Araújo
  16. Fredi A. Diaz-Quijano
  17. Helder I. Nakaya
  18. Julio Croda
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Abstract

Social distancing measures have emerged as the predominant intervention for containing the spread of COVID-19, but evaluating adherence and effectiveness remains a challenge. We assessed the relationship between aggregated mobility data collected from mobile phone users and the time-dependent reproduction number R(t), using severe acute respiratory illness (SARI) cases reported by São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. We found that the proportion of individuals staying home all day (isolation index) had a strong inverse correlation with R(t) (rho<-0.7) and was predictive of COVID-19 transmissibility (p<0.0001). Furthermore, indexs of 46.7% had the highest accuracy (93.9%) to predict R(t) below one. This metric can be monitored in real time to assess adherence to social distancing measures and predict their effectiveness for controlling SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

One Sentence Summary

Mobility data to monitoring social distancing in the COVID-19 outbreak

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