Insufficient social distancing may be related to COVID-19 outbreak: the case of Ijuí city in Brazil

Abstract

The coronavirus disease that initiates in 2019 (COVID-19) has proven to be highly contagious since it became pandemic quickly and nowadays presents higher transmission rates worldwide, including small Brazilian cities, as Ijuí. Located in the northwestern of the State of Rio Grande do Sul (RS) with 83,475 inhabitants, Ijuí was selected to receive a population-based survey divided into four steps separated by 15 days each that involved 1,750 subjects. Subjects were tested for the presence of antibodies against coronavirus (SARS CoV-2) and answered questions about social distance adherence, daily routine, comorbidities, and sociodemographic characteristics. In parallel, the local government registered the official COVID-19 cases in Ijuí. In this study, we demonstrated the levels of social distancing adherence and the beginning of COVID-19 community transmission in Ijuí and showed some predictions for cases, hospitalization, and deaths. We concluded that the insufficient social distancing registered in the population-based study might be related to the rapid increase of COVID-19 cases in Ijuí. Our study predicts a closer outbreak of community infection of COVID-19, which could be avoided or attenuated if the levels of the social distancing in the population increase in the next weeks.

Genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 tracks early interstate transmission of P.1 lineage and diversification within P.2 clade in Brazil

“…These results reinforce the importance of both local and international traveling restrictions as a preventive measure to slow the spread of the virus [28], measures still not enforced in Brazil and in many other countries. As an alternative, policies such as social distancing and early detection of more pathogenic variants could have curtailed the spread of P.1 and P.2 across states and unburdened the public health system [29][30][31].…”

A conceptual IoT-based early-warning architecture for remote monitoring of COVID-19 patients in wards and at home

“…While social distancing is essential to reduce the spread of the virus, they also have a severe impact on economies, which is more pronounced in developing countries where income inequality is high [6] . For example, economic issues, misleading information, and lack of infrastructure to sustain the isolation of families leads to the relaxation of social distancing and an increase in the number of cases in Brazil [7] .…”

Spatial Distancing and Regional Economic Resilience in the Time of COVID-19

“…To accomplish that, we conducted a descriptive study based on the exploratory analysis of the time series of the spatial distancing index in Brazilian states from February to July 2020. We tabulated data from the InLoco (2020) website, which is widely used to address spatial distancing in Brazil (e.g., Barberia et al, 2021;Heck et al, 2021;Peixoto et al, 2020). The referred index makes it possible to assess people's movement patterns based on geolocation data collected from mobile devices, such as cell phones (Peixoto et al, 2020).…”