The company hopes that this information would help officials in respective countries “understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings.”
Google on Friday published the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports for 131 countries to show how the lockdown owing to the coronavirus outbreak has affected the movement of traffic in public places.
The report uses “aggregated and anonymised data to chart movement trends over time by geography” across a range of places such as grocery and pharmacy stores, parks, workplaces and places of transit among other things. “We’ll show trends over several weeks, with the most recent information representing 48-to-72 hours prior. While we display a percentage point increase or decrease in visits, we do not share the absolute number of visits,” Karen DeSalvo, Chief Health Officer of Google Health wrote in a blog post.
The company uses similar data in Google Maps to show how busy certain types of places are, which in turn helps ‘identify when a local business tends to be the most crowded’.
The company hopes that this information would help officials in respective countries “understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings” during the lockdown enforced in various countries across the globe in light of the virus outbreak.
“Ultimately, understanding not only whether people are travelling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of communities,” DeSalvo wrote in the blog post adding, “Ultimately, understanding not only whether people are travelling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of communities.”
