2020/08/23 by Georg Heiler, Tobias Reisch, Heiler, Georg +11 · 1 citation
Mathematics · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Applications (stat.AP) #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Data-Driven Disease Surveillance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2008.10064
openalex publication_date 2020/08/23 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In March 2020, the Austrian government introduced a widespread lock-down in\nresponse to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on subjective impressions and\nanecdotal evidence, Austrian public and private life came to a sudden halt.\nHere we assess the effect of the lock-down quantitatively for all regions in\nAustria and present an analysis of daily changes of human mobility throughout\nAustria using near-real-time anonymized mobile phone data. We describe an\nefficient data aggregation pipeline and analyze the mobility by quantifying\nmobile-phone traffic at specific point of interest (POI), analyzing individual\ntrajectories and investigating the cluster structure of the origin-destination\ngraph. We found a reduction of commuters at Viennese metro stations of over\n80 % and the number of devices with a radius of gyration of less than 500 m\nalmost doubled. The results of studying crowd-movement behavior highlight\nconsiderable changes in the structure of mobility networks, revealed by a\nhigher modularity and an increase from 12 to 20 detected communities. We\ndemonstrate the relevance of mobility data for epidemiological studies by\nshowing a significant correlation of the outflow from the town of Ischgl (an\nearly COVID-19 hotspot) and the reported COVID-19 cases with an 8-day time lag.\nThis research indicates that mobile phone usage data permits the\nmoment-by-moment quantification of mobility behavior for a whole country. We\nemphasize the need to improve the availability of such data in anonymized form\nto empower rapid response to combat COVID-19 and future pandemics.\n