New Delhi, October 31 (IANS). A research conducted on 34,000 people in America has revealed that due to Covid-19, there has been a decline in people’s outdoor activities.
Research says that people are spending about an hour less time in outdoor activities. On this, researchers say that all this has happened due to the epidemic.
The team from Clemson University and University of California Los Angeles in the US revealed that there has been an overall decline of about 51 minutes in the time spent per day in outdoor activities since 2019. They also found that time spent on daily travel, such as driving or taking public transportation, also decreased by about 12 minutes.
In a paper published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Planning Association, the team documented a trend of spending less time outdoors since at least 2003.
However, Covid and its aftermath have led to a tendency among people to stay home or not go anywhere, which may have significant psychological, social and economic consequences, the researchers said.
Lead author Eric A., professor of city and regional planning at Clemson University, said: “Staying at home for extended periods of time can also lead to social isolation,” Morris said. Whereas, the major reasons behind this trend can be attributed to the improvement in information technology and the fact that people learned to use this technology in new ways during the pandemic.
The research showed that the average time spent for outdoor activities decreased from 334 minutes per day in 2019 to 271 minutes in 2021, which reduced the time spent outside the home from 5.5 hours per day to about 4.5 hours .
–IANS
MKS/ABM