How Covid-19 pandemic responds to social distancing efforts

India Today’s Data Intelligence Unit (DIU) analysed the latest coronavirus outbreak and mobility data to see the effects of social distancing on the spread of infection.

On Friday, March 18, the German parliament voted to lift all nationwide Covid-19-related restrictions. This was done at a time when the number of infections continued to be at an elevated level. Cases are rising again in some Asian and European countries. But most countries now have eased or are in the process of easing all Covid-19 restrictions that had been in place for the last two years. These moves raise the question about the effectiveness of social distancing to tackle Covid-19 cases.

The threat of a next wave of Covid-19 cases worldwide looms as a subvariant of Omicron, the BA.2 variant, has caused a considerable spike in cases globally. The World Health Organisation (WHO) opined that several European countries lifted their pandemic-driven restrictions too soon.

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Europe's regional director of the WHO, Hans Kluge, said that “the countries where we see a particular increase are the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, France, Italy and Germany.” And these countries, he added, lifted their Covid-19 curbs “brutally — from too much to too few.”

Data from the Google mobility report suggest that social distancing is gradually becoming less effective now than what was the case in the earlier Covid-19 waves.

Before vaccination, social distancing was one of the major strategies used worldwide to curb the spread of the virus.

Social distancing proved to be quite effective in the first wave (MarchApril 2020) of the pandemic compared to the subsequent waves. In the second wave, around October 2020, many European countries and the U.S. imposed restrictions. Though these restrictions were not as rigorous as earlier ones, their impact on curbing the spread of Covid-19 was minimal.