A research group consisting of Associate Professor Yoshihide Sekimoto of the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, and Takahiro Yabe, a short-term visiting international researcher, used location information obtained from mobile phones to help people before and after the announcement of the new coronavirus emergency declaration in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Analysis of behavior revealed that the interpersonal contact rate outside the home decreased to about 3% of normal times in early March and to about 6% of normal times in mid-April after the announcement of the emergency declaration.
According to the University of Tokyo, in addition to Associate Professor Sekimoto and others, Yahoo and Associate Professor Naoya Fujiwara of the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Professor Takayuki Wada of the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Osaka City University, and Satish of the University of Padhu Professor Uxri and others participated.
The research group defined the number of contacts as the average of the number of people who stayed within a distance of 100 meters for 30 minutes or more, and the contact rate as the ratio to the average of January weekdays before the Corona disaster.After that, we analyzed a large amount of movement trajectories transmitted from mobile phones and quantified how much people are in contact with other people in the city area.As a result, the contact rate outside the home was 1% in early March before the state of emergency was declared, and about 3% in mid-April after the state of emergency was declared.
There was a regional difference in the decrease in contact rate within Tokyo, and the rate of decrease was lower in areas with low average income than in areas with high average income.
So far, there have been research studies that estimate the number of people in a specific area from the location information of mobile phones, but there have been no studies that quantify people's contact.
Paper information:[Scientific Reports] Non-Compulsory Measures Sufficiently Reduced Human Mobility in Tokyo during the COVID-19 Epidemic
