With COVID rates dropping and vaccinations on the rise, the United States and other places are removing some requirements for face coverings. Are they moving too fast?

What the science says about lifting mask mandates

Today WHO has announced a new naming system for key #COVID19 variants. The labels are based on the Greek alphabet (i.e. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc), making them simple, easy to say and remember. https://bit.ly/3fxWgnn

10.1136/bmj.n1361

Local public health teams in areas with high case numbers of the B.1.617.2 variant first detected in India are boosting efforts to vaccinate their populations and targeting younger adults to try to limit the spread of infection.

Covid-19: Local councils initiate surge vaccination to tackle B.1.617.2 variant

In the wake of COVID, a pandemic treaty could be a way to agree on data access before the next emergency strikes.

Wanted: rules for pandemic data access that everyone can trust

10.31234/osf.io/6pv5c

The systematic review aimed to determine whether the YouTube recommender system facilitates pathways to problematic content such as extremist or radicalising material. The review assessed the eligibility of 1187 studies and excluded studies using the PRISMA process for systematic reviews, leaving a final sample of 23 studies. Overall, 14 studies implicated the YouTube recommender system in facilitating problematic content pathways, 7 produced mixed results, and two did not implicate the recommender system in facilitating pathways to problematic content. Thus, the review's findings indicate that the YouTube recommender system could lead users to problematic content via the recommender system. The review indicates a need for corrections to the recommender system to shift users away from problematic content.

A systematic review: The YouTube recommender system and pathways to problematic content

10.31234/osf.io/dvcqm

The practice of shared book reading is a nurturing support for early language, literacy and socio-emotional development within young children’s typical care. However, the closures of childcare and centers for family activities in the Spring of 2020 due to COVID-19 brought many sudden changes to care and the everyday lives of families with young children. In order to explore the impact of COVID-19 on shared reading, we surveyed parents of children between ages 2 and 5 (n = 85) about their children’s frequency of shared reading engagement in February and October, 2020 as well as the frequency of screen-mediated reading, the number of readers their children read with, and book preferences at both time points. Parents were also asked about changes in their children’s regular care and whether and how they had tried new kinds of (virtual) literacy activities during their increased time at home. Preliminary findings showed that there were no significant changes in frequency of shared reading from February to October, but there was a significant increase in frequency of screen-mediated reading, especially among families who lost outside-the-home childcare. There was also a significant decrease in the number of adults regularly reading with the children. Caregivers described adapting to virtual options for storytime. Ultimately, while families were still able to provide consistent amounts of shared reading with their children throughout COVID-19, the nature of that shared reading was changed. Future research will investigate whether these changes may have an impact on children’s typical learning from shared reading.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Families’ Home Literacy Practices with Young Children

10.31234/osf.io/esnzg

Here, I present the Assamese version of the COVID Stress Scale (Taylor et al., 2020).

COVID19 Stress Scale - Assamese Version

10.31234/osf.io/s9muj

From March 11 to April 26, 2020, the Italian government imposed a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, a quarantine that resulted in significant restrictions on the movement and social contacts of the population, with a view to limiting the pandemic outbreak. The quarantine forced people to experience distorted social distance in two contrasting ways. For some people, it resulted in social distancing and isolation, for example by separating noncohabiting couples into different dwellings. For others, however, quarantine increased and imposed social closeness, forcing couples and families into constant, daily, and prolonged cohabitation. The aim of this study was to investigate the sexual health and behaviors of Italian adults during the lockdown period using a multimethod research. An open- and a closed-ended e-questionnaire were administered immediately after the end of the lockdown. A total of 465 Italian adults completed the digital questionnaire (female = 78.7%). Participants recognized their lived sexual experience with generally positive characteristics (related to openness, unproblematic relationship with the body, and awareness and self-reflection about one’s sexuality), while negative thoughts such as worry and pain were quite scarce. Participants with a disability (5.6%) showed a marked inversion compared to the mean of respondents, recognizing themselves mainly in negative thoughts related to low self-esteem, inadequacy, and feelings of suffering, yet reporting a higher than mean level of arousal. In the qualitative analysis, the TF-IDF index was measured to extract the salient words employed by respondents to answer the five open-ended questions; this revealed a generally depressed emotional experience associated with the experience of lockdown, both in terms of desire, which seemed to be shifted more to the level of imagination and fantasies, and the actual possibility of experiencing sexual activity as usual. Nevertheless, the participants emphasized an opening to new possibilities in terms of expressing sexuality, accompanied by a rediscovery of the value of tenderness and affectivity as well as a clearer awareness of their sexual life, needs, and desires.

The sexual experience of Italian adults during the COVID-19 lockdown

10.31234/osf.io/374hx

Here, I present the Nepali version of the COVID Stress Scale (Taylor et al., 2020).

COVID19 Stress Scale - Nepali Version

10.1177/0956797620960011

Behavioral-immune-system research has illuminated how people detect and avoid signs of infectious disease. But how do we regulate exposure to pathogens that produce no symptoms in their hosts? This research tested the proposition that estimates of interpersonal value are used for this task. The results of three studies (N = 1,694), each conducted using U.S. samples, are consistent with this proposition: People are less averse to engaging in infection-risky acts not only with friends relative to foes but also with honest and agreeable strangers relative to dishonest and disagreeable ones. Further, a continuous measure of how much a person values a target covaries with comfort with infection-risky acts with that target, even within relationship categories. Findings indicate that social prophylactic motivations arise not only from cues to infectiousness but also from interpersonal value. Consequently, pathogen transmission within social networks might be exacerbated by relaxed contamination aversions with highly valued social partners.

Behavioral Immune Trade-Offs: Interpersonal Value Relaxes Social Pathogen Avoidance

10.1177/0956797620920547

To say that our consciousness about hygiene has been raised in recent weeks and months is to state the obvious. Who would have thought that early 2020 would see full-length instructional videos on handwashing techniques, set to catchy tunes? More seriously, who would have thought that whole societies would be placed under lockdown orders? Yet these are the new realities of life in the time of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19; with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez, 1985/1988). The implications of the COVID-19 pandemic have touched every aspect of life—and psychological research is no exception. With entire universities moving to remote instruction and virtually all other functions occurring online, researchers are facing an unexpected and sudden end to on-site, in-person data collection. For psychological scientists, this moment brings both promise and peril.

Practicing Good Laboratory Hygiene, Even in a Pandemic

10.1177/0956797620959594

How can we nudge people to not engage in unethical behaviors, such as hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines, during the COVID-19 pandemic? Because past research on antecedents of unethical behavior has not provided a clear answer, we turned to machine learning to generate novel hypotheses. We trained a deep-learning model to predict whether or not World Values Survey respondents perceived unethical behaviors as justifiable, on the basis of their responses to 708 other items. The model identified optimism about the future of humanity as one of the top predictors of unethicality. A preregistered correlational study (N = 218 U.S. residents) conceptually replicated this finding. A preregistered experiment (N = 294 U.S. residents) provided causal support: Participants who read a scenario conveying optimism about the COVID-19 pandemic were less willing to justify hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines than participants who read a scenario conveying pessimism. The findings suggest that optimism can help reduce unethicality, and they document the utility of machine-learning methods for generating novel hypotheses.

Using Machine Learning to Generate Novel Hypotheses: Increasing Optimism About COVID-19 Makes People Less Willing to Justify Unethical Behaviors

10.1177/0956797620964422

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a major challenge to societies all over the globe. Two measures implemented in many countries to curb the spread of the disease are (a) minimizing close contact between people (“physical distancing”) and (b) wearing of face masks. In the present research, we tested the idea that physical distancing and wearing of face masks can be the result of a prosocial emotional process—empathy for people most vulnerable to the virus. In four preregistered studies (N = 3,718, Western population), we found that (a) empathy indeed relates to the motivation to adhere to physical distancing and to wearing face masks and (b) inducing empathy for people most vulnerable to the virus promotes the motivation to adhere to these measures (whereas merely providing information about the importance of the measures does not). In sum, the present research provides a better understanding of the factors underlying the willingness to follow two important measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Emotional Path to Action: Empathy Promotes Physical Distancing and Wearing of Face Masks During the COVID-19 Pandemic

10.1177/0956797620967261

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating unprecedented, sustained, and unavoidable stress for the entire population, and older people are facing particularly heightened risk of contracting the virus and suffering severe complications, including death. The present study was conducted when the pandemic was spreading exponentially in the United States. To address important theoretical questions about age differences in emotional experience in times of crisis, we surveyed a representative sample of 945 Americans between the ages of 18 and 76 years and assessed the frequency and intensity of a range of positive and negative emotions. We also assessed perceived risk of contagion and complications from the virus, as well as personality, health, and demographic characteristics. Age was associated with relatively greater emotional well-being both when analyses did and did not control for perceived risk and other covariates. The present findings extend previous research about age and emotion by demonstrating that older adults’ relatively better emotional well-being persists even in the face of prolonged stress.

Age Advantages in Emotional Experience Persist Even Under Threat From the COVID-19 Pandemic

10.1177/0956797620958118

It has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 is transmitted between individuals. It stands to reason that the spread of the virus depends on sociocultural ecologies that facilitate or inhibit social contact. In particular, the community-level tendency to engage with strangers and freely choose friends, called relational mobility, creates increased opportunities to interact with a larger and more variable range of other people. It may therefore be associated with a faster spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Here, we tested this possibility by analyzing growth curves of confirmed cases of and deaths due to COVID-19 in the first 30 days of the outbreaks in 39 countries. We found that growth was significantly accelerated as a function of a country-wise measure of relational mobility. This relationship was robust either with or without a set of control variables, including demographic variables, reporting bias, testing availability, and cultural dimensions of individualism, tightness, and government efficiency. Policy implications are also discussed.

Relational Mobility Predicts Faster Spread of COVID-19: A 39-Country Study

10.1177/0956797620972688

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected intimate relationships? The existing literature is mixed on the effect of major external stressors on couple relationships, and little is known about the early experience of crises. The current study used 654 individuals involved in a relationship who provided data immediately before the onset of the pandemic (December, 2019) and twice during the early stages of the pandemic (March and April, 2020). Results indicate that relationship satisfaction and causal attributions did not change over time, but responsibility attributions decreased on average. Changes in relationship outcomes were not moderated by demographic characteristics or negative repercussions of the pandemic. There were small moderation effects of relationship coping and conflict during the pandemic, revealing that satisfaction increased and maladaptive attributions decreased in couples with more positive functioning, and satisfaction decreased and maladaptive attributions increased in couples with lower functioning.

Early Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Relationship Satisfaction and Attributions

IS THERE no problem artificial intelligence can’t tackle? Methods such as deep learning are finding uses in everything from algorithms that recommend what you should purchase next to ones that predict someone’s voting habits. The result is that AI has developed a somewhat mystical reputation as a tool that can digest many different types of data and accurately predict many different outcomes, an ability that could be of particular use for solving previously impenetrable problems within healthcare.

Artificial intelligence has been of little use for diagnosing covid-19

10.1177/0146167220950522

Researchers’ subjective judgments may affect the statistical results they obtain. This possibility is particularly stark in Bayesian hypothesis testing: To use this increasingly popular approach, researchers specify the effect size they are expecting (the “prior mean”), which is then incorporated into the final statistical results. Because the prior mean represents an expression of confidence that one is studying a large effect, we reasoned that scientists who are more confident in their research skills may be inclined to select larger prior means. Across two preregistered studies with more than 900 active researchers in psychology, we showed that more self-confident researchers selected larger prior means. We also found suggestive but somewhat inconsistent evidence that men may choose larger prior means than women, due in part to gender differences in researcher self-confidence. Our findings provide the first evidence that researchers’ personal characteristics might shape the statistical results they obtain with Bayesian hypothesis testing.

Can Researchers’ Personal Characteristics Shape Their Statistical Inferences?

India's government has instructed social media companies to remove any content that refers to the "Indian variant" of Covid-19.

Covid: India tells social media firms to remove 'India variant' from content

10.31234/osf.io/maush

Research recently showed that boredom proneness was associated with increased social distancing rule-breaking in a sample collected early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we explore data collected early in the pandemic to examine what factors might drive this relation. We focus on political affiliation. Given the functional account of boredom as a call to action, we hypothesized that this urge to act may drive individuals towards outlets replete with symbolic value (e.g., ideology, identity). In addition, given the politicization of some social distancing rules (e.g., mask wearing), we explored whether those who adhere to strong political ideologies—particularly conservative ideologies—would be more likely to rule-break. Moderation analyses indicated that boredom proneness and social (but not fiscal) conservatism were indeed predictive of rule-breaking. These results highlight the need for both clear messaging emphasizing the strength of communal identity and action (i.e., that “We are all in this together”) and for interventions that emphasize shared collective values in contexts that appeal directly to social conservatives.

Boredom proneness, political orientation and adherence to social-distancing in the pandemic.

The ruling is the first time that the European Court of Human Rights has weighed in on the issue of compulsory vaccinations. The decision could play a role in efforts to end the coronavirus pandemic.

ECHR rules obligatory vaccination may be necessary

Benefits far outweigh risks, overall.

Very useful slide from #JohnsonandJohnson/Jansen today at ACIP placing TTS/CVST as an adverse event with COVID vaccine against other common vaccines and their serious adverse events. cc: @NateSilver538

14. All in all, these are absolutely useless numbers, compiled in a transparently inappropriate fashion, and coupled with a message promoting fear around the leading vaccine candidates while making the manufacturer's own vaccine look good. It's awful propaganda from Sputnik.

13. Another example of the sorts of confounds in Sputnik's propaganda. (I have not independently verified this)

12. In the United States, for example, they compare 10.4 deaths (from all causes!!) per million Pfizer vaccine recipients with 7.5 per million J&J recipients. Pfizer were approved in December. J&J in February. Pfizer recipients have had a lot more time to die!

11. One straight-up falsehood on the Sputnik slide is that these numbers are being presented as death *rates*. Rates involve count per time. These don't take time into consideration. And that matters a LOT because some vaccines have been available longer than others.

10. Similarly, the reporting—both of deaths and of who has been vaccinated—can matter a great deal. How confident are you in the numbers coming out of those countries that have most heavily used Sputnik?

9. The age distribution can make a huge difference. If, for example. Pfizer is more often preferentially given to the elderly than is Sputnik, we would expect much higher overall death rates among those vaccinated with Pfizer compared to Sputnik.

8. The countries in question differ in factors including Age distribution of those vaccinated COVID incidence and mortality rate Background mortality rate Accuracy of vaccine logging and death reporting

7. Given that vaccine-associated deaths would be very low even if there *were* a problem, we would expect any causal differences by vaccine type to be swamped my demographic differences in who is receiving in the vaccine.

6. In the right column, we are given weighted averages. But these are nonsense as well, because the data are not collected in a way that allow for meaningful comparisons. Most critically, THESE ARE TOTAL DEATHS, NOT VACCINE ASSOCIATED DEATHS.

5. Taking the straight average of the death rate in Norway, which has vaccinated 1.2 million people, and the US, which has vaccinated 140 million people (not all with Pfizer, in either case), is bizarre. Why even show these numbers? Because they make Pfizer look bad.

4. Here are a few of the things wrong with these figures. The numbers in the column at left represent country-level averages, unweighted by number of recipients. No one with an iota of quantitative understanding would do this, unless trying to deceive.

3. But statistics (1) are only as good as the methods used to derive them, and (2) are only useful when they allow you to make fair and meaningful comparisons. The Sputnik V numbers fail spectacularly on both accounts.

2. Their unfounded claim is that we are observing higher death rates among Pfizer recipients. This is rubbish. In our book, we address the way in which people will try to bamboozle you with the unwarranted authority of numbers by throwing lots of stats at you.

1. Today’s antivax propaganda comes from a….vaccine manufacturer? Unfortunately, yes. The manufacturer of the Sputnik V vaccine is tweeting absolutely nonsense statistics in an effort to question the safety record of its competitors.

The UK continues to be at the forefront of covid-19 vaccine development and deployment. The ambitious vaccination programme forms the centrepiece of the UK “roadmap” detailing the path out of lockdown.

Optimising covid-19 vaccine uptake—time for a more nuanced approach

As vaccination rates slow, a Dallas woman who once garnered hundreds of thousands of social followers by expressing doubt about the safety of inoculations now says, “I trust the science.”

Why a Former Anti-Vax Influencer Got Her COVID-19 Shot

We need to be very honest with ourselves about what we know is true and what we hope is true.

@geoffrey_hurst @YouAreLobbyLud @DrDayaSharma @drvyom @drajm @enenbee @profmiketoole @PMGPSC @kiai @kenpcg @ketaminh @NjbBari3

We'd do well to consider Karl Popper's philosophy on falsifiability. We ignore black swans at our peril.

We're in a global emergency, we can't afford to assume best case and get it wrong. The caveat on superannuation returns applies "past performance is no guarantee of future performance".

Until we saw the emergence of: MRSA USA-300 and USA-400, and now (in my area of research) the emergence of hypervirulent (ST23 with K1 CPS) Klebsiella pneumoniae that produce ESBLs and carbapenemase. https://ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/Emergence-of-hypervirulent-Klebsiella-pneumoniae-ST23-carrying-carbapenemase-genes.pdf

There’s a lot of speculation that COVID may become less virulent. This is still an old concept in the field, akin to aerosol vs droplet. In my own field it was assumed that resistance came at the expense of virulence.

(PS, this is *even more* true if you replace “die” with outcomes like “hospitalized”, “long covid”, “have to spend several days in bed feeling like total crap”, etc. The more likely an outcome is, the MORE likely it is SOMEONE will experience it because you were infected.)

I’m seeing a lot of “these people are over-estimating risk” chatter that doesn’t acknowledge that the probability you die if you get covid is always less than the probability *anyone* dies if you get covid. It’s not “over-estimation” to consider community impacts.

Latest data from CDC on breakthrough cases (out of 115 million people fully vaccinated): - 1,359 hospitalized or fatal cases - 52% female, 79% over 65, 21% asymptomatic - 794 COVID-related hospitalizations - 181 COVID-related deaths https://cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html…

this is important because it means that lab based studies looking at this tell you meaningful things about real world efficacy - and the lab based studies are much quicker than real world ones.Quote Tweet

The Rockefeller Foundation planned the Covid-19 pandemic under the name ‘Operation Lockstep’. Our verdict This is entirely false. ‘Lock Step’ was the name of a scenario planning exercise that examined what might happen in a future pandemic, but differs considerably from the current pandemic.

Covid-19 pandemic was not planned by Rockefeller Foundation

President Biden announces the US will share doses of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines with other countries, in addition to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine https://cnn.it/2RtpXwB

Yep. Also the crux of the controversial Swedish Strategy ...

4) Vaccinations are reducing covid case counts and are overwhelming the impact of the mask mandate being lifted

3) A social influence theory: Liberals were waiting on Fauci/CDC/NYT for permission to de-mask, while conservatives had long ago ditched theirs. Abbott took his cues from the latter, but that meant his edict responded to conservative behavior rather than guide liberal behavior.

Some possible interpretations: 1) Individual behavior is more important than state mandates: TX policy change didnt get pro-mask ppl to ditch their mask, and anti-maskers had already ditched theirs 2) Warm weather (& luck) made it less consequential to abolish mask mandates

Weeks ago, Gov. Abbott made Texas the first state to abolish its mask mandate and lift capacity constraints for all businesses. So, what changed? Nothing. There was ~no effect on COVID cases, employment, mobility, or retail foot traffic, in either liberal or conservative areas.

10.1561/105.00000132

We study the changes in greeting behavior caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that after the use of handshakes and social kissing as forms of greeting decreased drastically, they became common again already a few months after the outbreak. Nevertheless, a consistently large proportion of respondents (around 57%) plan to change their greeting behavior permanently, either because they simply became used to it or because they want to avoid the danger of contracting and transmitting infectious diseases. As can be seen from the results of the first survey wave in April, 2020, the belief in conspiracy theories about COVID-19 did not influence the greeting behavior of individuals, but it proved to have a strong impact in the second survey wave in September, 2020.

Kisses, Handshakes, COVID-19 – Will the Pandemic Change Us Forever?

10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643568

COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to numerous new conspiracy theories related to the virus. The aim of this study was to simultaneously investigate a range of individual predictors of beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories that account for socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, education, economic standard, the importance of religion and political self-identification), distinctive motivational orientations (social dominance and authoritarianism), relevant social attitudes (sense of political powerlessness and trust in science and scientists) and perceived personal risk (perceived risk for self and family members, concern of being infected and expected influence of pandemic on one’s own economic standard). Participants were 1060 adults recruited from the general public of Croatia. The sample was a probabilistic quota sample with gender, age, level of education, size of a place of living and region of the country as predetermined quotas. The regression model explained 42.2% of the individual differences in beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Trust in science and scientists and political powerlessness were the strongest predictors, whereas fear of being infected had the weakest contribution in explaining variance of the criterion. Additionally, results revealed that the relation of authoritarianism with the belief in COVID-19 conspiracies was mediated by trust in science and scientists. The relation between social dominance and belief in conspiracies was also partially mediated by trust in science. Our results suggest that (re)building trust in science and lowering the sense of political helplessness might help in fighting potentially harmful false beliefs about the pandemic.

Who believes in COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Croatia? Prevalence and predictors of conspiracy beliefs

10.3389/fmed.2021.585115

The complexity of COVID-19 and variation in control measures and containment efforts of different countries have caused difficulties in the prediction and modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic. We attempted to predict the scale of the latter half of the pandemic based on real data using the ratio between the early and latter halves from countries where the pandemic is largely over. We collected daily pandemic data from China, South Korea and Switzerland and subtracted ratio of pandemic days before and after the disease apex day of COVID-19. We obtained the ratio of pandemic data and created multiple regression models for the relationship between before and after the apex day. We then tested our models using data from the first wave of the disease from 14 countries in Europe and the US. We then tested the models using data of these countries from entire pandemics up to March 30, 2021. Results indicates that the actual number of cases of these countries during the first wave mostly fall in the predicted ranges of liner regression excepting Spain and Russia. Similarly, the actual death of these countries mostly falls into the range of predicted data. Using the accumulated data up to the day of apex and total accumulated data up to March 30, 2021, the data of case numbers in these countries are falling into the range of predicted data, except for data from Brazil. The actual number of deaths in all the countries are at or below the predicted data. In conclusion, liner regression model built with real data from countries or regions of early pandemics can predict pandemic scales of the countries which the pandemics occur late. Such a prediction with high degree of accuracy provides valuable information for governments and public.

Towards a country-based prediction model of COVID-19 infections and deaths between disease apex and end: -Evidence from countries with contained numbers of COVID-19

10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01895

Background: In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, physical distancing measures have been implemented globally. Canadians have been instructed to stay at home, which has likely resulted in significant changes in their physical activity. Using data from a national physical activity tracking app (PAC app), we aimed to determine device-measured physical activity levels immediately prior to and following the implementation of physical distancing measures in Canada to provide evidence for the development of physical activity recommendations for future pandemics or second wave infections. Methods: Demographic and physical activity data were extracted from the ParticipACTION app (PAC app), using a 10-week (10 February to 19 April 2020) quasi-experimental design to determine changes in physical activity 4 weeks pre-pandemic and 6 weeks post-pandemic declaration. Weekly physical activity levels were monitored through wearable fitness trackers and health apps linked to the PAC app, to record moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), light physical activity (LPA), and steps. Repeated measure ANOVA was used to determine changes over time (mean ± SE). Findings: A total of 2,338 Canadians who were mostly 35–44 years old (26.6%) and female (90.2%) were included in the analysis. MVPA, LPA, and steps significantly declined immediately following the declaration of the pandemic (MVPA: pre-pandemic: 194.2 ± 5.2 min, post-pandemic: 176.7 ± 5.0 min, p < 0.001; LPA: pre-pandemic: 1,000.5 ± 17.0 min, post-pandemic: 874.1 ± 15.6 min, p < 0.001; steps: pre-pandemic: 48,625 ± 745 steps, post-pandemic: 43,395 ± 705 steps, p < 0.001). However, 6 weeks following pandemic declaration, MVPA (week 6: 204.4 ± 5.4 min, p = 0.498) had returned to pre-pandemic levels. LPA (week 6: 732.0 ± 14.3 min, p = < 0.001) and steps (week 6: 41,946 ± 763, p < 0.001) remained significantly lower than pre-pandemic levels at week 6. Interpretation: Although MVPA returned to pre-pandemic levels, significant and sustained declines in incidental LPA and steps were observed. Attenuating the loss of incidental physical activity should be a public health priority in response to future pandemics or a second wave of a COVID-19 infection, as it may have significant long-term implications for the physical and mental health of Canadians.

Don’t Walk So Close to Me: Physical Distancing and Adult Physical Activity in Canada