ABSTRACT
On 2 April 2020, Reuters photographers around the world captured the still silence that had descended on some of the world’s busiest public spaces, on the same day, at noon—New York’s Grand Central station; Tahrir Square in Cairo; Istanbul’s Eminönü ferry docks; Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; street market leading to the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf; Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo—in a seemingly post-apocalyptic world, stricken by the global pandemic caused by an invisible pathogen 900 times thinner than human hair. The tracking of cell phone location-data conducted in the United States by Cuebiq and The New York Times calculated median distance traveled by individuals in each census tract, and compared the data between the top ten percent and the bottom ten percent of household incomes for each metropolitan area which are based on median household income data from the United States Census Bureau. They concluded that staying at home during the Coronavirus pandemic “is a luxury.”.
