Other Mobility Studies

[jiweiqi]

• http://socialmobility.covid19dataresources.org Social distancing is an important component of the response to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Minimizing social in- teractions and travel reduces the rate at which the infection spreads, and ”flattens the curve” such that the medical system can better treat infected individuals. However, it remains un- clear how the public will respond to these poli- cies. This paper presents the Twitter Social Mobility Index, a measure of social distancing and travel derived from Twitter data. We use public geolocated Twitter data to measure how much a user travels in a given week. We find a large reduction in travel in the United States after the implementation of social distanc- ing policies, with larger reductions in states that were early adopters and smaller changes in states without policies.