COVID-19: Interesting Trends in Mobility Around the World

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Apple started publishing mobility trends for data enthusiasts and healthcare experts to find insights around navigation habits of people amidst COVID-19 lockdown.

The data takes 13 Jan as the benchmark for navigation habits and all the numbers for subsequent dates indicate percentage increase or decrease over 13 Jan.

Mobility trend in Jan and Feb 2020

Greens Indicate Traffic higher than 13th Jan, Reds Indicate Traffic lower than 13th Jan

Tools Used to do mobility analysis

Microsoft Excel for analysis.
Microsoft PowerPoint for annotations.

Insights on mobility during COVID-19 lockdown

Here are a few interesting Insights:

Almost all the countries have locked themselves down after WHO’s declaration of COVID-19, a global Pandemic. And, obviously, the traffic goes down in major cities.

Mobility trends after the announcement of Covid-19 lockdown

The green patches in the no lockdown period indicate increased mobility on Saturdays and Sundays

2. There are a few countries such as China, Japan, Taiwan, and Russia that continued to allow people to move freely after WHO’s declaration.

Countries with maximum mobility during covid-19 lockdown

3. There were a few countries such as South Korea, France and Italy that have enforced lockdown, long before WHO’s advisory.

Countries where mobility was low due to early announcement of Covid-19 lockdown

4. Mobility analysis illustrates that COVID-19 lockdown at various places is not 100% effective. The fact that we can still see dark patches on Sundays mean people are commuting (for work?) on weekdays. Can we attribute all this traffic to people purchasing essentials?

Sundays have the lowest traffic during covid-19 lockdown

5. Lockdown in India is fairly successful based on the mobility data from Mumbai and Delhi. There’s gradual decrease in mobility after the lockdown.

Traffic in Delhi and Mumbai during covid-19 lockdown

6. There was abnormally high traffic (~200%) in Cairo on 24th Feb (a Monday.) We looked up the news – It was reported that there were heavy thunderstorms and thousands were stranded on roads (even an Egyptian Premier League game was called off). This might have led to people searching for alternate navigation routes that increased the traffic.

Cairo had the highest traffic in the world on 24th Feb 2020

Bonus: Crude Oil Prices went down by 99.98% during this period!

This chart shows the eventual decrease in prices of crude oil during Covid19 pandemic

Download the source excel file on which the conditional formatting is applied to explore insights yourself.

Download the excel file hereDownload

Check out the insights on the huge drop in electricity demand during the 9-min lights out campaign in India.

Here are a few more data stories on Covid19.

If you have any other interesting Hypotheses, do comment.

Vamsi Suggula

Vamsi Suggula is an Associate Principal Consultant at Gramener. He is passionate about blending data-driven insights with compelling storytelling to inspire action. He writes on Consulting, Data Storytelling, and Insight frameworks.

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View Comments

Nisha says:

27/04/2020 at 10:24 am

Vamsi, It is interesting to note on 3rd insights that these countries were badly hit though they were early movers in the lockdown. I wonder if it is contradicting to the current logic of distancing.