Google Shows How People Have Stopped Moving Across The World To Help Fight COVID-19

If you want to see how the Coronavirus pandemic has changed the movement of human beings on a day to day basis, just look outside your window. If, however, you want to notice the pattern across the world, you will require Google’s location history data which has now been released to the public.?

Under its COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, Google has released aggregated data 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.”

In other words, this data shows the graphs for locations across the world depicting how the human movement in these locations have been affected since the past month or so. The data is helpful to notice how effective the Coronavirus-induced lockdowns have been in countries.

(Representative Image: Reuters)

Google’s report charts these movement trends across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential. A look at the graph in India shows that mobility has increased in residential areas than before while visits to all the other places have seen a massive decline.

However, the most recent information shared through these data points is that of 48? to 72 hours prior the current time.

To keep the privacy of its users intact, Google will not be sharing any information about the devices or the user that the data is sourced from or, for that matter, even the total number of people visiting an area. Instead, the data only focuses on “a percentage point increase or decrease in visits.”

A snapshot of India's mobility data during Coronavirus lockdown

Specifically procured from Google Location History on Android devices and first-party mobile apps, Google has released the data for 131 countries across the world. There are, however, further geographies within the nations that can be focussed on in the data findings.

As per Google, the location history and tracking of people movement can help governments take appropriate action for the difficult times. The data alone can help optimise delivery services as well as transportation once the lockdown is over. On a different aspect, it will potentially also help the government determine any mass gatherings in an area with no relation to an essential service.