Apple recently started publishing mobility trends for researchers to find meaningful insights around navigation habits of people amidst COVID-19 lock down.
The Data
The data talks about the volume of navigation requests coming from different cities — day wise from Jan 13 to Apr 17. Apple being Apple, to ensure that the data released adheres to their privacy standards has not released any personal data. They’ve set a benchmark of 13th Jan for Navigation Requests. The volume for all the subsequent days is published in terms of percentage increase or decrease in comparison with Jan 13. For E.g, if Feb 01’s data for Mumbai reads 121.35, it means Mumbai saw 21.35% more traffic on 1st Feb in comparison with 13th Jan.
Tools Used
Good old Excel! I have arranged and applied conditional formatting to the data in the following way to make it conducive for finding insights.
Greens Indicate Traffic higher than 13th Jan, Reds Indicate Traffic lower than 13th Jan
Insights
Here are a few interesting Insights:
1. Almost all the countries have locked themselves down after WHO’s declaration of COVID-19, a global Pandemic
The green patches in the non lock down period indicate increased mobility on Saturdays and Sundays
2. There are a few countries that continued to allow people to move freely after WHO’s declaration:
3. There were a few countries that have enforced lock down, long before WHO’s advisory:
4. Lock down at various places is not 100% effective: The fact that, we can still see dark patches on Sundays mean people are coming out (for work?) on weekdays. Can we attribute all this mobility to essential services?
5. Lock down in India is fairly successful based on data from two cities
6. Cairo: There was abnormally high traffic — 200% on 24th Feb (a Monday.) I looked up the news and it was reported that there were heavy thunderstorms and thousands were stranded on roads (even an Egyptian Premier League game was called off) because of which people might have searched for alternate navigation routes that increased the traffic
Bonus: Crude oil prices went down by 99.98% during the COVID-19 period!
If you have any other interesting Hypotheses, do comment.
Comentários