The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Quebec is still surging (7,944 as of April 5th), which prompted Premier François Legault today to extend the shutdown of all but essential businesses in the province until at least May 4. On the other hand, there are two encouraging indicators as to where Quebec stands from flattening the curve, even though it’s still a bit early to tell when this will happen.
The first one is the below graph showing where Quebec stands right now which is below the projected numbers by Quebec Sante.
Then there are the Google mobility reports which are feeding users’ location history to “chart movement trends over time by geography, across different high-level categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential”. The stats are not highly accurate, but they can give the authorities a hint on how compliant people are with the social distancing measures.
Looking at Canada’s report, Quebec scored the highest decrease in mobility trends for places like restaurants, cafes and malls at 70%, add to that a 68% drop in visits to parks and 75% drop in visits to transit stations.
In fact, someone crunched the stats for all of North America, and Quebecers came out on top as those who respected the stay-at-home measures most, followed by District Columbia, New York and Vermont. Canada’s average % drop in visits to retail & recreation places was roughly 59%, versus 47-48% for the US.
Again, Google’s stats may not be highly precise, but they’re good indicators to have.
