Social distancing compliance: A video observational analysis

Abstract

Purpose Virus epidemics may be mitigated if people comply with directives to stay at home and keep their distance from strangers in public. As such, there is a public health interest in social distancing compliance. The available evidence on distancing practices in public space is limited, however, by the lack of observational data. Here, we apply video observation as a method to examine to what extent members of the public comply with social distancing directives. Data Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) footage of interactions in public was collected in inner-city Amsterdam, the Netherlands. From the footage, we observed instances of people violating the 1.5-meter distance directives in the weeks before, during, and after these directives were introduced to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Results We find that people complied with the 1.5-meter distance directives when these directives were first introduced, but that the level of compliance started to decline soon after. We also find that violation of the 1.5-meter distance directives is strongly associated with the number of people observed on the street and with non-compliance to stay-at-home directives, operationalized with large-scale aggregated location data from cell phones. All three measures correlate to a varying extent with temporal patterns in the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, temperature, COVID-19 related Google search queries, and media attention to the topic. Conclusion Compliance with 1.5 meter distance directives is short-lived and coincides with the number of people on the street and with compliance to stay-at-home directives. Potential implications of these findings are that keep- distance directives may work best in combination with stay-at-home directives and place-specific crowd-control strategies, and that the number of people on the street and community-wide mobility as captured with cell phone data offer easily measurable proxies for the extent to which people keep sufficient physical distance from others at specific times and locations.

Systematic review of interventions to promote the performance of physical distancing behaviours during pandemics/epidemics of infectious diseases spread via aerosols or droplets

“…The six papers that met the inclusion criteria reported the effect of 14 interventions (and three other control interventions) and included over 5531 participants 5 . The studies included randomised controlled trials (Bos et al, 2020;Khoa et al, 2021;Lunn et al, 2020); non-randomised trials (Blanken et al, 2020;Chutiphimon et al, 2020); and a natural experiment (Hoeben et al, 2021).…”

“…Studies were based in Europe (Bos et al, 2020;Blanken et al, 2020;Hoeben et al, 2021;Lunn et al, 2020), Asia (Chutiphimon et al, 2020); and North America (Khoa et al, 2021). Data were collected between January -August 2020 (See Table S1).…”

“…Study samples were taken from the general population (Bos et al, 2020;Hoeben et al, 2021;Khoa et al, 2021;Lunn et al, 2020); university staff, students, graduates and visitors (Blanken et al, 2020;Chutiphimon et al, 2020) Interventions included: instructional message, delivered online from a medical professional, focused on health consequences (Bos et al, 2020); instructional message, delivered online from a medical professional, focused on moral duty (Bos et al, 2020); decal stickers (i.e. a design on durable stickers) on floors to show recommended distance (Chutiphimon et al, 2020); government recommendation to keep a 1.5m physical distance from people not in your household (Hoeben et al, 2021); government fines in the event of not adhering to the mandated 1.5m physical distance from people not in your household (Heoben et al, 2020); instructional posters demonstrating distancing behaviour (control poster -Lunn et al, 2020); posters demonstrating violations of 2m distancing with implied health consequences (Lunn et al, 2020); images demonstrating physical-distancing (Khoa et al, 2021); one-way system (Blanken et al, 2020); and buzzers to indicate proximity violations (Blanken et al, 2020). Interventions were mainly set online (Bos et al, 2020;Khoa et al, 2021;Lunn et al, 2020); in semi-public spaces (Blanken et al, 2020;Chutiphimon et al, 2020); public spaces (Hoeben et al, 2021).…”

“…a design on durable stickers) on floors to show recommended distance (Chutiphimon et al, 2020); government recommendation to keep a 1.5m physical distance from people not in your household (Hoeben et al, 2021); government fines in the event of not adhering to the mandated 1.5m physical distance from people not in your household (Heoben et al, 2020); instructional posters demonstrating distancing behaviour (control poster -Lunn et al, 2020); posters demonstrating violations of 2m distancing with implied health consequences (Lunn et al, 2020); images demonstrating physical-distancing (Khoa et al, 2021); one-way system (Blanken et al, 2020); and buzzers to indicate proximity violations (Blanken et al, 2020). Interventions were mainly set online (Bos et al, 2020;Khoa et al, 2021;Lunn et al, 2020); in semi-public spaces (Blanken et al, 2020;Chutiphimon et al, 2020); public spaces (Hoeben et al, 2021). See Table 1 for full description of studies.…”

“…One study, from Netherlands, explored distancing pre and post government distancing recommendations (Hoeben et al, 2021)…”