Google uses location data to show COVID-19 impact in 131 countries

Never before, outside of wartime, has the world’s population had to live under travel and movement restrictions like those currently in place around the world.

Google have made use of its vast collected user location data to give us and government policy-makers an indication of just how effective movement restrictions have been in changing user behaviour.

Google location report for South Africa

According to Google, they are looking to provide “insights into what has changed in response to work from home, shelter in place, and other policies aimed at flattening the curve of this pandemic.”

The Google report is broken up into categories of locations with graphs showing visits to these types of locations over time.

The report covers Retail & Recreation, Grocery & pharmacy, Parks, Transit stations, Workplaces, and Residential as the different categories of locations users visit.

There are currently user location reports available for 131 countries which includes South Africa. 

Anonymity and privacy

If you’re a bit of a data geek and are running out of things to do while you’re sitting at home, you can flip through the reports of 131 countries and get a feeling for just what an impact this virus has had on the world and the way we live.

Google has obviously gone to great lengths to anonymise the data. You naturally won’t be able to see any data for individuals or any other user identifiable information. So there’s no chance this data would be sufficiently granular to allow contact tracing.

The reporting makes use of differential privacy adding “artificial noise to [its] datasets enabling high-quality results without identifying any individual person.”

Google hopes that the data would allow policy-makers at a very high level understand what impact their movement restrictions have.

Social distance assistance

This will allow governments to identify potential points of failure like, for example, if public transport is still being utilised by a large portion of the population.

These kinds of insights would allow governments to intervene by staggering transport or making more vehicles available during peak hours to facilitate physical distancing.

As for South Africa’s report, the graphs make for very interesting reading. At the moment the only report available was last updated with data up to 29 March 2020. So that would have been three days into our lockdown.

Impact on economy

The graphs paint a fairly accurate portrait of what we witnessed during the weeks leading into lockdown. Visits to public place decreased gradually in the weeks leading up to the lockdown as the reality of the coronavirus was communicated.

In the days directly leading up to the lockdown, there is a massive spike in visits to retail and recreation as well as grocery and pharmacy locations as South Africans headed out to make sure they had the necessary.

Visits to workplaces are down 49% compared to baseline. While many companies have their employees working from home, a significant percentage of this will also be employees whose jobs have been deemed not to be essential.

If there was any doubt about how significant the impact of the lockdown has been on people and the economy, these numbers are a sobering reminder of just how much has changed.