
Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports - elies
https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
======
bradfa
I think that Google and Apple will be extremely helpful in the coming months,
at least in the USA, for tracing the spread of COVID-19. Google and Apple know
where probably 90+% of adults/teens in the USA are located in real time. If
they are able to anonymously tell you that you were in the same building as
someone who has tested positive for the virus then you could take extra
precautions or further isolate yourself to help prevent the spread. This
wouldn't be perfect but it would be much more data than is given to people
today about who is infected and it would make tracing contacts much easier for
health officials.

A small number of people who read sites like Hacker News will find this an
appalling invasion of privacy. Health officials will think it's a really
useful thing to try. It'll be interesting to watch, if it does happen.

In the near term, I would happily try to convince everyone I meet to opt-in to
such a service as I feel the health benefits could greatly outweigh the
privacy concerns. But then when we do have a better long term solution for
this virus I would also strongly recommend people to disable the tracking.

~~~
cm2187
Having your medical records broadcasted to anyone nearby you, how could it go
wrong?

~~~
lihaciudaniel
Exactly this is creepy dystopian. And also think how much it tracks everything
you do including opening apps and everything you search

------
NZ_Matt
Fascinating data, the US generally showing a less than 50% change while other
countries with national lock downs are >90%.

It'd be very interesting to see this data overlayed against cases of covid,
you maysee them both follow a similar downward trend with a week or two delay.
Possibly also determine what change in mobility is required to prevent
exponential growth

------
mariojv
The data around parks & recreation seems really odd to me, does anyone else
agree?

Anecdotally, the public parks where I live (Bexar County, Texas) have gotten
so busy that I rarely go on weekends anymore because social distancing has
been made so difficult. Even after 5pm on weekdays, I've seen a spike in
traffic similar to what a really busy weekend would look like. This has been
the case at every park I've been to. Since basically any other form of
recreation outside the home is no longer available, it makes sense that
they're busier.

Perhaps they're including places like theme parks in that category? Bexar
County, to my knowledge, doesn't have enough closed state parks to account for
the drop in traffic. Obviously, I'm missing something. Maybe people just
aren't searching for parks further from them and don't need directions to
their closest park.

------
moonchild
Is this data available in structured format anywhere, or do you have to scrape
the pdfs?

~~~
currycurry16
Let's collect the data in a machine readable form together!

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HYTBDsbGeTHY664DNDJ-...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HYTBDsbGeTHY664DNDJ-
bPiJpdCwAhJGRbomXpvyzLA/edit?usp=sharing)

EDIT: Can someone make a map out of the data? (It might not be comparable, but
still)

------
rohan1024
India's mobility report[1] shows a spike in outside activities just before
lockdown. I hope I am wrong but I think we are going to see spike in
coronavirus cases just before end of lockdown. Not sure what government will
do then.

[1]:
[https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_IN_Mobil...](https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_IN_Mobility_Report_en.pdf)

~~~
legolas2412
I think that spike is just the two normal days between 22nd's curfew and 25's
lockdown

~~~
rohan1024
Definitely not normal because you can see the spike in grocery stores. People
were stocking up.

~~~
legolas2412
Umm, but the activity is still lower than the baseline of normal day.

There is no reason to expect a sudden increase in cases because of those two
days in particular

------
ninju
I wonder if the graphs are affected by a "starting" bias, meaning is the
mobility on the first date, February 17th for the charts I was looking at,
used as the measure for seeing the trend on subsequent dates. The issue what
if that date was particularly cold or rainy and then as we moved into March
the weather got better of course you would see greater mobility movement as
compared to a cold February day esp. the category of Parks and recreation

But instead had they used is sliding window for the baseline (i.e. using the
average of the mobility for the past 3 years) for any given day then seeing
what this year's date is as compared to that we would see (hopefully) a
dramatic decline.

Just thinking out loud

Take care and _STAY DISTANT_

------
newsbinator
Here's the one for the country where I live, Belarus:

[https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_BY_Mobil...](https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_BY_Mobility_Report_en.pdf)

Notice anything unexpected?

~~~
sheldoneth
I'm curious, does that look accurate to you? Do you know why it jumped by 41%
for parks?

~~~
usr1106
At least here in Finland you couldn't miss that when going outside. One factor
is sunshine. Another probably kids getting unbearable after not having to go
to school for many days. Probably also applies to parents working from home.
Lot of families taking a walk. They closed natural parks after they got
overcrowded.

------
pi-squared
I started a repo [1] that parses the data. PRs welcome.

[1]
[https://gitlab.com/pisquared/scrape_google_mobility](https://gitlab.com/pisquared/scrape_google_mobility)

------
nroets
Some of the models assume the effect of a lockdown was immediate.[1] The
reality is that retail declined before the lockdown.

So this data will help tremendously. It even shows the panic buying buying
before the lockdown in South Africa.

[1]: [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-
college/medicine/s...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-
college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-Europe-
estimates-and-NPI-impact-30-03-2020.pdf)

------
lawrenceyan
Retail & Recreation down 47% and Grocery & Pharmacy down 22% in the United
States. Wow, I didn't think it would be such a significant drop.

~~~
soneil
I'm in Ireland .. Retail & Recreation are down 80-90% in most counties!

What I did find interesting though, is that after the initial lockdown, we
show a reliable increase in "parks", that all take a sharp nosedive after it
was tightened and we were told recreation should be within 2km of home.

That felt like something of a facebook-furor at the time, but it seems
google's data really does back it up.

------
rbinv
With all this data, I've always wondered why there isn't some sort of internal
"hedge fund" at Google.

~~~
twic
A theory i have heard from someone in the hedge fund industry is that this use
of "alternative data" is mostly marketing. Investors go to hedge funds for
their genius high-alpha proprietary strategies. If you can honestly say that
you are feeding tracking of honeybee movements into your model, that makes you
seem like far-out geniuses with loads of alpha, so you will attract more
investors. For a hedge fund, attracting investors is more important than
actually doing good trades.

Of course, nobody will say this out loud.

This is not to say there are not some genuine users of alt data. Of course
there are! But it's not happening at the scale that everyone wants to believe.

This is a very similar story to the whole "big data" thing in Main Street
businesses.

------
csomar
Here is Sweden:
[https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_SE_Mobil...](https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-03-29_SE_Mobility_Report_en.pdf)

Clearly people are afraid but it's nowhere close to countries which enforced a
lock-down.

~~~
grey-area
Deaths have doubled in 3 days so Sweden is growing exponentially too, it just
started a little later than other countries so it's in the part of the curve
that feels pretty innocuous.

It's quite remarkable how similar the trajectories are starting from around
the 1st death (though of course later trajectories might differ markedly
depending on the measures taken now).

The FT has some good charts of this:

[https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest](https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest)

~~~
jaclaz
IMHO these are better (counting in cases/deaths per million inhabitants is
much more comparable than absolute counts):

[http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/)

Namely (Sweden):

[http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#covid-eu-
norm2](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#covid-eu-norm2)

[http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#rates-
nordic](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/#rates-nordic)

~~~
grey-area
Those show cases not deaths, I'm not sure that's very reliable as a measure -
the testing varies dramatically, it will be tempting for governments to
undertest and it's hard to get hold of tests now.

Just to pick one example the US has shot up to top place by cases in the last
few days mainly because they started seriously testing.

Personally I prefer graphs of deaths (normalised for population would be fine
I guess), starting from 1st death or similar rather than arbitrary offsets in
date as the spread only begins from the first cases (usually undetected).

------
spuz
It would be interesting to be able to compare countries. For example, which
countries have responded most to a lockdown and which have not responded at
all? The data is already broken down by state so it would be good to see this
data on a map of the US.

~~~
avian
They specifically say in the report that data differs even between individual
regions in a country and are not comparable.

It's really more of a qualitative "we have these numbers and they went up/down
like this" kind of a report. They don't say what the numbers mean (except some
vague sense of being related to "visits and length of stay"). I find it really
hard to draw any kind of conclusion from this.

------
usr1106
Why would anybody turn on location history? (Serious question, I don't even
have Google Play Services in my phone). 95 % users are known not to touch any
settings. I guess Google has a trick to make more of them do it. Which one?

~~~
MikusR
Why wouldn't I? I can see where and when I was, how long I was there. It can
give context to notes and photos. It's essentially an extension of memory.

~~~
novaRom
If it's an extension of your memory, then why deliberately share it with
others, with police, with FBI? There were many stories on HN how random people
got into troubles because of this "feature".

~~~
Broken_Hippo
And this is something that should be a call for change in government, a call
for change in leadership, and a change in how the laws are structured. Perhaps
better police/FBI training. And so on.

I'll also mention that these things are memorable because they are outliers in
general, and sometimes spectacular. This is why we remember plane crashes and
ignore the numerous shower accidents that kill folks.

------
fxj
Why PDF? There is nothing in the reports that could not be done with html.

~~~
adrian_mrd
From The Verge’s report [1] “Google said that it chose PDFs over web pages
because they could be more easily downloaded and shared with workers in the
field.”

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206318/google-
location-d...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206318/google-location-
data-mobility-reports-covid-19-privacy)

~~~
silon42
We really need EPUB support in browsers/OSs (in a safe way aka no JS
extensions).

------
ekianjo
Japan is like "What pandemic?". So unbelievable.

------
rbinv
Why is China missing?

~~~
izacus
Perhaps because Google services are blocked in China and Android phones there
don't have Play Services with Location History?

You can't plot data you don't have ;)

~~~
baybal2
There are millions of people in China with always on VPNs, and they still have
a non-insubstantial business in the country.

The thing is, the geographic data there is protected by law, and they don't
want an espionage charge.

The same is provably true for a suspicious missing of a few other countries
with similar attitudes.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
If you're using a VPN, your location won't show up as mainland China.

~~~
baybal2
VPN goes not affect GPS signal as far as I know

~~~
danielrpa
I think that the location services use a mix of IP-based and GPS-based
localization - GPS doesn't work too well indoors, while getting your IP from
your wireless router (ie internet provider) is much more reliable.

------
munchman
potentially stupid question - why do the residential increases seem relatively
low compared to the decreases in other locations?

~~~
Delfino
Just a guess: people already spent more time at home than in other areas so if
the absolute amount of time increased at home the same as it decreased
elsewhere, the percentage increase is smaller for homes than percentage
decrease elsewhere?

------
mesum
Hyperurl.co/pakcovid

Goto last Tab

------
heurifk
I'm ok with Google having this data. I'm not ok with governments having it.

~~~
sixstringtheory
Why? At least with government you have theoretical recourse at the polls. With
a megacorp you can’t do shit if you don’t like what they’re up to.

~~~
creato
Right, you can't do shit... except not turn on location history, which as this
page says, is off by default.

~~~
danielrpa
In this case the government wouldn't have that information either.

