Key info


Date:
29 May 2020

Authors:
Benjamin Jeffrey, Caroline E Walters, Kylie E C Ainslie, Oliver Eales, Constanze Ciavarella, Sangeeta Bhatia, Sarah Hayes,  Marc Baguelin, Adhiratha Boonyasiri, Nicholas F. Brazeau, Gina Cuomo-Dannenburg, Richard G FitzJohn, Katy Gaythorpe, William Green, Natsuko Imai, Thomas A Mellan, Swapnil Mishra, Pierre Nouvellet, H Juliette T Unwin, Robert Verity, Michaela Vollmer, Charles Whittaker, Neil Ferguson, Christl A. Donnelly and Steven Riley1

1Correspondence:
s.riley@imperial.ac.uk

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WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling, MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics, Department of Mathemtics, Imperial College London, University of Oxford

Now published in Wellcome Open Research; 17-07-2020, doi: https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15997.1

Summary

Since early March 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic across the United Kingdom has led to a range of social distancing policies, which have resulted in reduced mobility across different regions. Crowd level data on mobile phone usage can be used as a proxy for actual population mobility patterns and provide a way of quantifying the impact of social distancing measures on changes in mobility. Here, we use two mobile phone-based datasets (anonymised and aggregated crowd level data from O2 and from the Facebook app on mobile phones) to assess changes in average mobility, both overall and broken down into high and low population density areas, and changes in the distribution of journey lengths. We show that there was a substantial overall reduction in mobility with the most rapid decline on the 24th March 2020, the day after the Prime Minister’s announcement of an enforced lockdown. The reduction in mobility was highly synchronized across the UK. Although mobility has remained low since 26th March 2020, we detect a gradual increase since that time. We also show that the two different datasets produce similar trends, albeit with some location-specific differences. We see slightly larger reductions in average mobility in high-density areas than in low-density areas, with greater variation in mobility in the high-density areas: some high-density areas eliminated almost all mobility. We are only able to observe populations living in locations where sufficient number of people use Facebook or a device connected to the relevant provider’s network such that no individual is identifiable. These analyses form a baseline with which to monitor changes in behaviour in the UK as social distancing is eased.

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