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Using Google data for assessing the relation between Covid-19 spread and social distancing

The paper examines the relation between the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic and the respective measures adopted by various countries collectively labeled as “social distancing”. The progress of the disease is publicly available from the data published by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) that contain the new cases of Covid-19 and deaths from Covid-19 per country on a daily basis. Moreover, Google reports the situation regarding social distancing in a number of social activity categories in several countries based on data gathered by users of mobile phones using Google mobile applications. The paper analyzes these two sets of data for 22 countries (20 in Europe plus the USA and Canada) and shows a significant correlation between the decrease in the levels of social distancing and the daily rate of increase of new Covid-19 cases. Consequently, the discussion is concerned with the effect of social distancing measures per category of social activity, the level of conformance displayed by citizens in each country as well as the number of days required between the imposition of the measures and their effect on the spread of the pandemic. This discussion provides additional insight that can assist policy makers in imposing the most effective set of measures as well as the proper sequence of measures withdrawing in in similar situations.