On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Countries around the world rushed to declare various states of emergencies. Canada was no different. By 19 March 2020, all Canadian provinces and territories had enforced some forms of lockdowns, and the Canada-US border was shut.
Lockdowns are difficult decisions to make – politically and economically. Closing borders, grounding road, rail and air transport, closing schools, offices, entertainment and sports venues, and non-essential services come at a huge cost to individuals, businesses and society. But restricting human movements is essential to check the spread of the pandemic and ensure our health systems do not collapse.
I conceived “Monitor My Lockdown” when my school doors closed due to the COVID-19 lockdown. I wanted to measure the impact of lockdowns in reducing movements of people. I started with installing sensors and camera in front of my home and measuring changes in street sound levels, city night lights, pollution levels, and traffic on the road. Later, I wanted to expand my analysis to the entire country. To do so, I moved from ground-level measurements to subsurface measurements and started analyzing data from seismic stations across Canada.
I wrote custom algorithms to gather, analyze and visualize 80 billion lines of seismic data gathered from 14 seismic stations across Canada starting from October 2019. The goal was to measure seismic vibrations prior to the lockdown and compare them to seismic vibrations during the lockdown for different cities. I successfully measured a drop in seismic vibrations for most Canadian cities. In densely populated cities such as Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, the seismic vibrations associated with human activities dropped between 20%-30% during the lockdown.
See detailed results: the seismic silences of Canadian cities during the COVID-19 lockdown.
The results of my project are presented as a Web App so that they can be used for COVID-19 pandemic management.
Policymakers and media can use the App to monitor effectiveness of lockdowns in different Canadian cities and compare them to different periods. Healthcare workers can use the App to predict for spikes in COVID-19 cases due to increase in human movements. They can then make arrangements for additional personal protection equipment (PPEs) and testing kits. Researchers can use the App to extract seismic vibrations over different frequencies. View the Web App: http://www.MonitorMyLockdown.com
The pandemic does not respect national boundaries. Every country is grappling with how to enforce lockdowns to manage the pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) is warning of deadlier pandemics in the future. We need to be prepared.
I created an online tutorial so that users anywhere can analyze seismic data for their cities and measure the impacts of lockdown. The tutorial takes an hour to complete and is run using Jupyter Notebook.