ABSTRACT

The Government of India imposed the strictest lockdown from 25 March 2020 till 31 May 2020 to control the spread of coronavirus outbreak. Consequently, about 1.38 billion people were under home confinement. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we studied circadian rhythm (CR) in the usages of Facebook Messenger (FBM), as a group phenomenon, and published the findings in this journal. We thought it would be worthwhile to carry out a sequel study to assess if there are any changes in the CR in the patterns of digital activity of the FBM users during the COVID-19-triggered lockdown. All the authors of this paper harvested real-time data from their FBM account for over 16 consecutive days between 26 March and 17 April 2020. A statistically significant CR in the digital activity pattern of FBM friends of all the authors was validated. Results of one-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed a statistically significant higher Mesor and amplitude of the rhythm in FBM activity patterns during the lockdown; however, acrophase remained unchanged. We concluded that the COVID-19-triggered lockdown did not affect the location of the peaks and the persistence of CR in the online activity patterns of FBM users.

摘要

印度政府从 2020 年 3 月 25 日至 2020 年 5 月 31 日实施了最严格的封锁，以控制冠状病毒爆发的蔓延。因此，约有 13.8 亿人被居家隔离。在 COVID-19 大流行之前，我们研究了 Facebook Messenger (FBM) 使用中的昼夜节律 (CR) 作为一种群体现象，并在本期刊上发表了研究结果。我们认为值得进行后续研究，以评估在 COVID-19 触发的锁定期间 FBM 用户的数字活动模式的 CR 是否有任何变化。本文的所有作者在 2020 年 3 月 26 日至 4 月 17 日期间连续超过 16 天从他们的 FBM 账户中获取实时数据。验证了所有作者的 FBM 朋友的数字活动模式中具有统计学意义的 CR。单向重复测量方差分析的结果显示，锁定期间 FBM 活动模式中的 Mesor 和节律幅度具有统计学意义；然而，前期保持不变。我们得出的结论是，由 COVID-19 触发的锁定不会影响峰值的位置以及 CR 在 FBM 用户的在线活动模式中的持久性。