Google Mobility Data Shows How The World Is Staying At Home

Social distancing, distributed work places, these have become part of our vocabulary seamlessly. They now define the new normal, which is not normal at all. Curfew is nothing new in Sri Lanka. We all have had experiences with it. When we were young, we in fact, looked forward to those days. They meant that we could get on to the lane and play cricket. No one really bothered us.

- Amantha Perera

The new curfew is not so lenient, the virus will not respect human boundaries and as such, no one wants to take a chance.

But do we know how much social distancing has impacted our lives, how much it has changed our way of life in the last month? Other than anecdotal evidence and funny stories of hen-pecked husbands and not so funny stories of abused partners, what else do we know? How can we know?

Well, at least we can get an idea of what has happened and all the data is coming from something that is indispensable these days, your phone.

Google last week publicly made available its community mobility reports. What these reports do is collate data gathered from mobiles that have their location turned on. And Sri Lanka is one of the countries where the data is available, unlike China, which landed us all in this mess.