E-Paper
Mobility to recreational and retail places drops by 86%
Data from the report shows that the highest drop in people’s mobility among big states was seen in Delhi and Maharashtra, the two regions which saw the initial surge in Covid-19 cases.
India saw an 86% drop in people visiting retail and recreational places, while those visiting parks, transit stations, and grocery and pharmacy units dropped by more than 50% each during the national lockdown imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), according to the latest community mobility data released by Google.
Data from the report shows that the highest drop in people’s mobility among big states was seen in Delhi and Maharashtra, the two regions which saw the initial surge in Covid-19 cases. Maharashtra had close to 10,500 confirmed cases by Thursday night, the highest in India, while Delhi had more than 3,500 cases, the third highest count in the country.
The community mobility reports by Google, which also show trends over several weeks, are a composite representation of the number and length of visits people make to certain kinds of places compared to a baseline --in this case, a five-week period before the infectious disease started spreading across the world. The data is collected from users who opt-in to location history for their Google account, without revealing their identity.
Across India, visits to parks, transit stations, workplaces, and grocery and pharmacy units dropped by 68%, 66%, 41% and 51%, respectively. On the other hand, visits to residential places increased by 22% as people largely stayed home during the lockdown.
To understand how mobility trends changed in different states, Hindustan Times ranked states and Union territories on their average drop in mobility to non-residential places. The states which saw the highest drop in overall mobility are Chandigarh (85%), Delhi (82%), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (71%) and Maharashtra (71%). The states which saw the lowest drop are Mizoram (34%), Arunachal Pradesh (39%), Bihar (41%) and Manipur (41%).
Lakshadweep and Jammu and Kashmir have been excluded from this calculation. Data for all parameters was not given for Lakshadweep. In Jammu and Kashmir, internet services were not active throughout the year, which can produce erroneous results. This is visible in Google’s report as Jammu and Kashmir has shown a surge in visits to transit places and workplaces during the lockdown, which is contrary to the ground situation.
To be sure, while this data helps understand the impact of the lockdown across different states, Google says this may not represent the exact behaviour of a wider population as this is based on data from only a limited number of users who opted in to location history for their Google account. Also, data for regions with different characteristics may not be accurately comparable (such as comparing a predominantly urban state with a rural one) because, Google says “location accuracy and the understanding of categorized places varies from region to region”.
