In Charts I How much India has stopped moving after the coronavirus outbreak

Google mobility data suggest that post-lockdown, India saw a 77 percent fall in public mobility to places like retail restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theatres as compared to the corresponding five-week period from January 3 to February 6

Ritesh Presswala

April 06, 2020 / 17:22 IST

Google used anonymous location data it collects from Android phones across the world to build global indices of how much people have stopped moving around. Here what it found out about India.

Google mobility data suggest that post-lockdown, India saw a 77 percent fall in public mobility to places like retail restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theatres as compared to the corresponding five-week period from January 3 to February 6.

Even transportation mobility trends seems to stand still, down over 70 percent from the corresponding period. It includes places like public transport hubs such as subway, bus and train stations.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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