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

Modelli de Andrade, L. G.; Ferreira, G. F.; Tedesco Silva, H.

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 compared 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