i've been speaking w/ @NickHudsonCT & @peter_castleden and their @PanData19 project for south africa.

SA is getting hit savagely hard by lockdown rules that make little to no sense and are already having dire economic effects.

i ran some google mobility data for them.

it's bad

this is the fastest, sharpest drop i have seen in any country in the world. on 3/26 they were at baseline. on 3/27 they were at -69%.

it's like they turned off a switch.

this is also a VERY deep drop, perhaps the deepest i've seen.

this is shown with the US for comparison.

some of the individual subsets are even more worrying.

look at time at work and on public transit. this is a good proxy for economic damage.

the sawtooth is from weekends. you really want to trace the bottom of the curve.

they dropped 80%. (the US, dropped 40-50%)

time at home also spiked to levels i have not seen in any other country. we have a similar weekend sawtooth here, you want to follow the top of the curve.

high lockdown countries saw a rise in time at home in the low/mid 20's. this was high 30's

south africa is not a rich country. they have crushed work and locked millions of people in their homes/townships.

on this part of the preston curve, this is a recipe for wholesale death. SA per capita GDP is ~$6k. median income is closer to $4700.

that's the steep part.

this is an entirely predictable and entirely avoidable humanitarian disaster in the making.

it's going to be magnitudes worse that the disease.

please support these folks in their mission to get this rolled back before it does any more harm. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-05-05-actuaries-warn-ramaphosa-of-a-humanitarian-disaster-to-dwarf-covid-19-if-restrictive-lockdown-is-not-lifted/