Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Apr 26, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 26, 2021 - May 10, 2021
Date Accepted: Jun 17, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 3, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Exploring the utility of Google(R) Mobility data during COVID-19 pandemic: A digital epidemiological analysis from India.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Association between human mobility and disease transmission for COVID-19 is established, but quantifying the levels of mobility over large geographical areas is difficult. Google released Community Mobility Report (CMR) data collated from mobile devices and gives an idea about the movement of people.
Objective:
Therefore, we attempt to explore the use of CMR to assess the role of mobility in spreading COVID-19 infection in India.
Methods:
An Ecological study analyzed CMR for human mobility. The data were compared for before, during, and after lockdown phases with the reference periods. Another dataset depicting the burden of COVID-19 after deriving various disease severity indicators was derived from a crowd-sourced Application Programming software. The relationship between the two datasets was investigated using Kendall’s tau correlation to depict the correlation between mobility and disease severity.
Results:
At the national level, mobility decreased everywhere except residential areas during the lockdown period, compared to the reference period. Mizoram (minimum cases) depicted a higher relative change in mobility than Maharashtra (maximum cases). Residential mobility negatively correlated with all other measures of mobility. The magnitude of correlations for intra-mobility indicators was comparatively low for the lockdown phase compared to other phases. A high correlation coefficient between epidemiological and mobility indicators is observed for the lockdown and unlock phases compared to the pre-lockdown.
Conclusions:
We can use mobile-based open-source mobility data to provide the temporal anatomy of social distancing. CMR data depicted an association between mobility and disease severity, and we suggest that this technique supplement future COVID-19 surveillance. Clinical Trial: NA
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