Millions around the world are heeding the extraordinary pleas for keeping social distance to combat the coronavirus by avoiding landmarks, resorts and other large gathering places.
That’s the unmistakable takeaway from a series of satellite images released Tuesday of highly trafficked locations from New York’s Central Park to Milan’s Cathedral and Moscow’s Red Squares.
The before and after images captured over the past several weeks, as governments around the world have increasingly implored their citizens to avoid large groups, show very few people at these typically crowded spots at popular times of day.
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“Particularly now, people are hungry to know what’s happening. We have a perfect view of one aspect of this crisis,” Stephen Wood, a senior director at Earth-imaging company Maxar, told POLITICO. “We feel compelled to get this information out.”
The Colorado-based Maxar operates four satellites which can collect 3 million square kilometers of high resolution images around the globe every day. The imagery is typically provided to a wide variety of customers and used for a variety of purposes ranging defense and intelligence to urban development and mapping.
The recent images are just a snapshot — and by definition an incomplete one. They do not offer any empirical data on exactly how many schools or restaurants have been closed, families that are resisting the temptation of recreational outings, or companies’ ordering their employees to telework.
And there are clearly gaps in the data. For example, Wood said images of Miami Beach and Paris, where there has been public demonstrations despite the coronavirus warnings, have not been available in recent days due to cloud cover.
But the satellites do provide clear visual evidence that unprecedented numbers of people are staying away from each other — the single most important countermeasure that health officials say can slow the spread and ultimately help defeat the virus.
Source: Social distancing from space
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