Sounds of The Pandemic LUIZA SCHIRMER

Brazil has been going through several turmoils over the recent years, and the pandemic has made things even crazier. With the number of deaths still on the rise, lockdown measures are being discussed on a weekly basis. I interviewed Ricardo Savaris, an OBGYN Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul who also has postdocs in statistics and Big Data. Along with other three Brazilian colleagues, he published a study in Scientific Reports in Nature on March 5th called “Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study”. They looked at whether the extent to which people stayed at home, measured using Google mobility data, is associated with COVID mortality in different countries. The results were astonishing.