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Work from home and avoid traveling if possible: the Federal Council has been pushing this with more urgency since October 19. The idea behind: Those who stay at home avoid encounters on the train, in the office or on the plane. And fewer encounters mean less chance of infection with the coronavirus.
New figures from Corona’s mobility monitoring, which the Intervista company compiles on behalf of the Scientific Working Group, the Canton of Zurich and the economic research center, show: The call from the federal government is being followed with hesitation.
Twice more mobile than during lockdown
Peter Moser is deputy director of the Statistical Office of the Canton of Zurich and is jointly responsible for the study of the movement. He says: “You can see from the transaction data that the central office recommendation and Federal Council measures have not yet had a massive impact.” Mobility has been slowly declining since mid-September. But there is still no deep cut.
The approximately 2,500 study participants come from all regions of Switzerland and are between 15 and 79 years old. The data transmitted through the smartphone shows that this Thursday they were on average twelve kilometers from home. For comparison: the range of motion of the same group was six kilometers on Thursday, March 26, ten days after the start of the blockade.
The population was on the move back then about half of what it is today. The statistician Moser explains the difference with the stores that are open. When almost all the shops (hairdressers, florists, etc.) and the entire catering sector were closed in March, the corresponding staff also stayed at home. Also, schools were closed for a time.
Show a pattern. The lure for working from home is showing some effect. But the effect of the actual restrictions is much greater. This can be seen, for example, in the decrease in the movement of children on Fridays and Saturdays, as soon as restrictions and mask requirements were put in place and clubs were finally closed.
The distance 15-29-year-olds travel on a Friday has dropped by about 10 kilometers since mid-September.
The number of travelers has barely decreased
The image is different for travelers. Intervista’s motion study also records how many study participants, who normally work outside their own four walls, are currently traveling. Before the crown crisis, the number of commuters was 50 percent. (The fact that the number is so low even under normal conditions is due to part-time workers.) During the shutdown, the number of commuters was cut in half by a quarter.
In the summer, when the lockdown was lifted and the number of cases was low, about 40 percent commuted again every day. This proportion has hardly decreased since the home office was recommended. It was 39 percent on Thursday. Martin Ackermann, chairman of Corona’s Scientific Advisory Committee (Scientific Working Group) was not very satisfied with the number of travelers on Friday.
On social media, however, employees complain that the head office’s recommendation is not binding. His superiors did not accept the appeal.
What role does the interurban effect play?
Population mobility plays an important role in the spread of the virus. A research team from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health showed in a study that metropolitan areas, in which several cities are closely linked by economic, social and passenger flows, are the most susceptible to pandemic outbreaks. ” That was the conclusion they came to after analyzing 913 urban areas in the US The constellation of multiple connected cities was found to be more susceptible to the spread of the virus than densely populated areas with fewer connections to other metropolitan areas.
The fact that there might be something to the American researchers’ findings was also demonstrated in Germany, where the east is much less affected by the virus outbreak than the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The eastern metropolises of Dresden and Leipzig are much less connected than Cologne and Düsseldorf, for example.
Anyone who has ever sat on the train from Zurich to Bern in the morning knows that Swiss cities are also closely connected. About 20 percent of travelers leave their canton of origin to work. Therefore, the interurban effect described by the researchers should also play a role in Switzerland.
