Google Uses Its Data To Show How Mobility Changes During COVID-19 Pandemic

Google’s newly released Community Mobility Report offers valuable data on global movement trends in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Using Google Maps technology, these insights are comparing recent location data with similar data from two months ago in order to evaluate the efficiency of social distancing measures taken by governments. The report covers 131 countries and offers a downloadable PDF for each country all around the world.

The Community Mobility Reports “are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is turned off by default” as Google says on a blog post accompanying the release of the reports.

The PDFs feature the mobility trends across six categories of locations: Recreation & Retail (cafes, restaurants, museums etc.), Grocery & Pharmacy (grocery markets, food markets, pharmacies etc.), Parks, Transit Stations (subway, bus and train stations), Workplaces and Residential.

The reports show how visits and length of stay have changed comparing data from approximately 2-3 days ago to a baseline – an average of data from two months ago – and they will be available for a limited time only and as long as they are valuable.

In Qatar specifically, according to the Community Mobility Report for our region, there is a significant shift in movements showing a major decrease in almost every category in response to social distancing measures to combat COVID-19.

The most dramatic changes are focused on retail and recreation with a 50-percent drop in March and April and a 52-percent drop in visits in transit stations.

Furthermore, with remote work being strongly recommended, it is only logical that there would be a 36-percent drop in mobility trends in workplaces while visits at parks showed a decrease by 35-percent.

On the other hand, visits at grocery stores and pharmacies dropped slightly by 21-percent and movement data in residential areas were increased by 24-percent in Qatar.

You can download the Community Mobility Report about Qatar here to check out the movement trends around the country over the past two or three days and see how Qataris’ behavior has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.