When Covid-19 came to Russia, life in the cities changed. International experience showed that to slow down the spread of the virus and thus save lives people should stay home. For safety reasons and to decrease the number of social contacts, the president announced weeks off of work. But people perceived this as vacation and went out for walks, bbqs and other free-time activities. Somebody had to do something, otherwise this could result in more cases. This is when Yandex, Russia’s largest creator of many apps and services for a convenient life used by over a half of the population daily, decided to step in and use its resources to save people.

Traditionally, at the beginning of May, Russians have public holidays: these are the first warm days of the year when everyone goes to barbecues or parks with families and friends.

That is why, when Covid came in spring and the president announced the days off of work, everyone saw these days as additional holidays. Lots of people went out on the streets and parks of hundreds of Russian cities, spreading the virus.

After that, the number of Covid cases skyrocketed immediately. Hospitals became overwhelmed as they were not ready for so many people yet.

At that moment it was unclear how many people were there on the streets, or more importantly, how to make them self-isolate.

We came up with a simple idea: just as you can’t change the temperature if you don’t measure it, you can’t change the number of people on the streets if you don’t know how many are there. That is how the Self-Isolation Index was developed. This is an anonymous data-based tool that showed how well people were self-isolating in different cities. It is based on the anonymous data from over 20 Yandex mobile apps and services that are daily used by over 60% of mobile users in Russia. We had to make the Index clear for everyone, even children, that is why we made it in a form of a simple 5-grades scale. And to make this index more emotional, we colored it: red color meant the citizens were on the streets and in danger, green color meant they were at home and safe.

Yandex’s ecosystem includes dozens of mobile apps for a convenient city living, like maps, taxi, movie and music streaming, food delivery, etc. These apps are used by over 60% of Russian mobile users. Our homepage yandex.ru is the most visited page in Russian language internet with over 70mln daily views and around 70% of mobile traffic. That is why when Covid came and the national self-isolation regime was announced, we started noticing changes in how people used our apps. We decided to use anonymous trends from our services and create a Self-Isolation Index. We placed it on yandex.ru, so it became impossible to ignore for anyone: regular users, bloggers, media and even officials. We also replaced an indicator of city traffic in all our map-based apps with our Index, as people looked at them 2 times a day.

It’s impossible to notice when one person changes behaviour, but when there are many of them, it becomes a trend. And this is what happened. Staying self-isolated, people didn't plan many routes, didn’t use metro map or order taxis. But they ordered more deliveries, read more content and news feeds, watched more movies. We compared these anonymous trends from over 85mln users of our 24 main services and apps with the same data from before the pandemic. After all calculations we aggregated the result into a simple 0 to 5 grades scale where 0 was equal to the regular activity on a day before the pandemic, and 5 meant most people were at home. The Index was measured in real time for 173 cities with over 100k population. We sent push notifications daily and when Index changed by more than 0.3 points, so people were kept up to date.

• ~8 billion total impressions, including worldwide coverage in news, media and social platforms.

• +20mln search queries daily – Yandex became the most noticeable company in Russia during the pandemic and raised the number of Russian internet users from 57 to 60%.

• The Index became an official metric of self-isolation across Russia, as the government noticed this and started to refer to it in meetings.

• According to a research made by Higher School of Economics National Research University, the joint efforts of people and government on self-isolation helped prevent 80,000 deaths from Covid during the first two months of the pandemic.