Lockdown compliance in Chennai least in Tamil Nadu: IIT study

NEW DELHI: Days before Koyambedu market, a wholesale hub in Chennai, emerged as a major hotspot leading to a spike of at least 215 new Covid-19 cases, a team of researchers at IIT-Madras had submitted reports to state government officials based on their work on mobility data mapped from Facebook users. This was then integrated with data from the crowdsourced portal of covid19india.org.
These reports, which track lockdown violations and mass movements in the state, shared from March 22 with the state government officials, show how the lockdown is witnessing increased mobility, particularly in Chennai, especially during weekends.

The IIT-Madras team mapped the mobility data of Facebook users in every district in Tamil Nadu, and came up with an analysis on how lockdown compliance in Chennai was far less than in other districts. They showed pockets in North Chennai, areas in and around Central station, Koyembedu market and some fishing hamlets as areas with large-scale movement in spurts.

According to Balaraman Ravindran, professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, who heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI, at IIT-Madras, the data helped the team draw a co-relation between the areas that complied with the lockdown and the spread of infection there.The location feature of Facebook lets anonymised data get pulled from smartphones and other devices with GPS to generate a map that provides area-level information about distance and movement of people, Ravindran said. On Monday, reports showed a 17% increase in mobility in the state, compared to during the April 26-29 lockdown and a 7% increase from the April 14-25 lockdown (2.0). Mobility on Monday showed a 16% increase from April 26-29 lockdown but a 15% decrease from lockdown 2.0, the reports show. The team has mapped mobility and infection spread in Chennai, Cuddalore, Ariyalur, Sivagangai, Perambalur, Villupuram and Kanchipuram, and others. Increase in mobility was observed during weekends, particularly in Chennai, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur. Overall, mobility has increased in lockdown 3.0, the reports showed.

Tamil Nadu health secretary Beela Rajesh confirmed that the government control room was getting reports from IIT-Madras and Facebook. “Data is an important part of our Covid-19 surveillance. We have data committees and control rooms monitoring reports we get from various sources.”