Role of stay-at-home requests and travel restrictions in preventing the spread of COVID-19 in Japan

COVID-19 is one of the worst global health crises in a century. Japan confirmed its first case of COVID-19 in mid-January and declared a state of emergency in April and May 2020, urging people to stay at home and reduce travel. Using Mobile Spatial Statistics (i.e., population statistics created from operational data of mobile terminal networks), we estimated daily intra- and inter-prefectural population mobility in the Tokyo Megalopolis Region, Japan in 2020. Then, we developed a compartmental model with population mobility to explore the role of stay-at-home requests and travel restrictions in preventing the spread of COVID-19. This model describes the COVID-19 pandemic through a susceptible-exposed-presymptomatic infectious-undocumented and documented infectious-removed (SEPIR) process and incorporates intra- and inter-prefectural population mobility into the transmission process. We found that people significantly reduced travel during the state of emergency, although stay-at-home requests and travel restrictions were recommended rather than mandatory. The reduction in population mobility, combined with other control measures, resulted in a substantial reduction in effective reproduction numbers to below 1, thus controlling the first wave of the pandemic. Moreover, the relationship between population mobility and COVID-19 transmission changed over time. The dampening of the second wave of the pandemic indicated that smaller reductions in population mobility could result in pandemic control, probably because of other social distancing behaviors. Our proposed model can be used to analyze the impact of different public health interventions, and our findings shed light on the effectiveness of soft containments in curbing the spread of COVID-19.