On March 15th, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee ordered all bars, restaurants and recreational facilities closed. The next day, New York followed suit, in a move coordinated with New Jersey and Connecticut. In Florida, by contrast, Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t issue a stay-at-home order until April 1st, more than two weeks later. And in Sweden, there was never any real lockdown, even if bars and restaurants there have been operating under restrictions that govern use and occupancy.

Four jurisdictions. Four different lockdown timetables. Imagine if we were able to plot an index of human activity in these four places. These graphs would show, one might predict, that things were going along fairly normally, perhaps starting to dip, until a lockdown went into effect, and then activity levels plunged abruptly.

It so happens we can plot such an index, because Moovit, an Israeli-based transit-app service provider, has released its metadata in regard to ridership in dozens of cities around the world. And in the graph below, which I created based on Moovit’s numbers, you can see ridership (expressed in percentage terms, as a deviation from original baseline) versus time for four municipal groupings, corresponding to the above-listed jurisdictions: Seattle, New York City, Miami, and Stockholm. Without a legend to tell you which line matches with which city, can you tell which is which?