Social distancing is happening in the UK, but the country lags behind others in some of the key measures, according to data gleaned from a variety of sources over the past seven days.

Transport use is down, restaurant bookings are non-existent and more people than ever are working from home, according to companies operating across Britain’s technology industries. Globally, use of at-home fitness programmes is soaring, but so too is children’s use of screens, as schools close around the world.

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Despite pictures of crowded trains circulating on social media, peak London congestion was down two-thirds on Monday morning compared with a typical rush-hour, according to the satnav firm TomTom. In Milan, it was down almost 90%. According to FlightRadar24, only 124 flights left London Gatwick airport on Sunday, compared with more than 400 scheduled on a normal day.

Citymapper, a London-based transport app, began publishing a mobility index on Friday, which shows the proportion of normal travel was still occurring in the 41 cities around the world where it operates.

London, Birmingham and Manchester all registered huge drops in public transport use, down to 23%, 25% and 26% of normal patterns respectively. British cities, however, sit firmly in the bottom quarter of the index. Thirteen areas have fallen to single-digit percentages, including Milan, Barcelona, New York City and thewhole of the Netherlands.

The company’s statistics for London mirror those being studied in government, which the Guardian understands show tube travel down 81% compared to a normal day and bus travel down 69%.

Other data sources showed the UK doing better in some aspects of social distancing. OpenTable’s state of the industry report shows UK and US restaurant bookings down 100%, a result of widespread voluntary and mandatory closures. Bookings are down 99% globally, but in Australia they are down only 54%.

Figures from NordVPN show that the use of business virtual private networks (VPNs) has risen 48% in the UK since 11 March, allowing people working from home to do so as if they are connected to a corporate network. NordVPN has also noticed average working hours increasing from nine to 11 a day as employees find it harder to fully disconnect.

Children are suffering no such problems, but Bosco, an app for parents to monitor their children’s digital lives, has recorded widespread effects of social distancing as well. Average screen time for children has almost doubled since schools closed, from 4.3 hours a day as of the end of February to six hours over the last working week and a peak of 8.4 hours on Sunday.

Not all screen time is necessarily unhealthy though. The YouTube yoga instructor Adriene Mishler has more than tripled her daily audience to more than 1.5m views in the last two weeks. The Instagram fitness guru Joe Wicks’s live PE with Joe broadcast, a half-hour session for children and adults that he intends to air daily from now on, drew 1.7m views on Monday morning.