Social distancing will help earth bounce back

Cities can enforce social distancing at regular intervals to help bring down pollution levels

This is the third column I have written while in home quarantine with my husband and son. Three weeks down, our dogs are growing increasingly suspicious of their habitually dressed-down owners. They now have a don't-you-have-someplace-to-go look on their faces. They discovered that my daily commute ends in my garden and that my occasional visits to the supermarket are the most exciting getaways I have had in weeks. The park outside our villa is cordoned off to unequivocally declare that it is practising social distancing from everyone. 
This is our shared experience of social distancing, a term I was ignorant about until a couple of months ago. World over, humans are trying to maintain a distance of at least 1.5 meters to minimise the community transmission of Covid-19. But social distancing was not always about viruses.
In Victorian times, women wore voluminous crinoline skirts to maintain social distance. It was initially worn to maintain a safe distance from troublesome suitors, before it became a status symbol. But largely, social distancing was enforced on communities when disease outbreaks turned into a crisis, like the influenza or the Black Plague epidemics. Social distancing is a tried and tested intervention measure for such outbreaks.  
Google has tapped into its aggregate location data to produce Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports. The data is shown as anonymised percentage increase or decrease. The reports tell us how people have responded to social distancing guidance in 131 countries. In the UAE, between mid-February and March end, data suggests a 55 per cent reduction in mobility in retail and recreational areas and 53 per cent reduction in movement in parks and beaches. The park outside my villa fed into that data. 
The highest decline of movement (-69 per cent) has been in public transportation such as buses and metro. However, grocery stores and pharmacies showed a mere 29 per cent decrease. Not surprisingly, the only increase was in our movement in residences. No wonder my dogs made note of it.
In comparison, in the US, there was a 51 per cent decline in movement in public transportation and 47 per cent decrease in mobility in retail and recreation areas and merely 19 per cent decline in parks and beaches. This shows that UAE has fared far better in maintaining social distance as compared to the United States. Now that Dubai has introduced more stringent rules of movement, the reports should show a greater reduction in movement in workplace as well.
This kind of data when combined with Covid-19 cases data becomes crucial in readjusting public policy and messaging during pandemics. The insights can be mapped to the surge capacity of hospitals, and the availability of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) in that area. 
The fight against Covid-19 has really become a data analytics play at a macro level. Our personal concerns of data privacy will necessarily take a back seat during a global crisis of such magnitude. Data privacy will become less of a concern if the aggregated social distancing data is made public. 
Countries that have fared better in fighting Covid-19 have essentially weaponised social distancing data. South Korean government developed an app to track movements of people ordered to stay home. The person and the designated case officer were notified when the person stepped out of the quarantine area. The government is tracking the movement of people using credit card transaction data, video surveillance records, and personal interviews. Singapore government launched a contact tracing app called TraceTogether that uses Bluetooth to track those in close contact with a patient. Insights garnered from this data among other measures helped to effectively flatten the curve.  
Covid-19 is teaching populous countries like India a thing or two about social distancing. It has not been easy to maintain social distancing in India, where trains routinely carry the population of entire cities, and personal space is an alien concept. Indians in general are not comfortable with empty space. If you are not breathing down the neck of the person in front of you in a queue, people lined up behind you invariably get offended. Now, political and administrative will, combined with public awareness has helped to enforce social distancing to a great extent. 
The busiest Indian cities have never been so quiet. Their pollution levels have plunged. 
New Delhi has recorded a 71 per cent drop in the average concentration of PM 2.5 in one week - from 91 microgram per cubic metre to 26. 
Yet, once our fight against Covid-19 pandemic is won, we will go back to our regular lives. The skies will no longer be blue, and the canals in Venice will be no longer be clear. The birds' singing will be drowned out by the sound of honking cars. The trouble is that we now know the difference. Social distancing has given us a glimpse of what the planet may feel like if we slowed down intermittently. 
We must have a similar conscious attitude towards preserving our planet. Cities can enforce social distancing at regular intervals to help bring down pollution levels. Data-driven risk models will help us assess how changes in movement can improve the air quality and noise level. Social distancing data needs to be weaponised in our fight against climate change. 
 
Shalini Verma is CEO of PIVOT technologies