THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: People’s presence in Kerala’s public spaces is far higher than the national average, according to Google’s latest Community Mobility report dated March 7, 2021. The report which maps mobility trends in six location types indicates that the state’s economy is nearing the prelockdown level faster than the country. The location types in the report are ‘retail and recreation’, ‘supermarket and pharmacy’, ‘parks’, ‘public transport’, ‘workplaces’ and ‘residential’.
The mobility trends in these locations on a particular day are mapped in the report. Of the six categories, the state lags behind the national average in the segments of ‘retail and recreation,’ a marginal difference of two points, and 16 points lower in public transport. The periodical Community Mobility reports aim to help public health officials prepare the Covid-19 response plan, according to Google. Insights in the reports are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from Google users who have turned on their location history setting. The data shows how visitors to (or time spent in) the categorized places change when compared to the baseline days.
A baseline day represents a normal value for that day of the week. It is the median value from the fiveweek period January 3 - February 6, 2020. The mobility report for Kerala has data for all the fourteen districts. But a general conclusion on the most ‘active’ district is nearly impossible with the figures showing a large variance even within 24 hours. For instance, on March 7, 2021, Kozhikode topped in mobility at parks, +40 points and Idukki the lowest, -29 points. On the previous day, the top and bottom ranks in this category were for Kozhikode and Wayanad, ‘+29’ and ‘-42’ respectively.
Kerala’s health department, however, is not utilising the Google’s Community Mobility report for the Covid-19 response, according to Dr Mohammed Asheel, executive director of Kerala Social Security Mission and a member of the state’s Covid-19 taskforce. “The data is highly useful and many countries are using it for pandemic response. Privacy concerns in Google’s data collection prompted us to exclude the report from our planning activities,” he said.
“At present we are using the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected- Recovered-Death (SEIRD) modelling to analyse the progression of Covid-19. But the mobility report is location specific data and it would be more useful in several aspects of Covid-19 control,” he added. The state’s high number of Covid cases when compared to the national average cannot be linked with the high mobility, according to Asheel. “High density of population might be the reason for the high mobility recorded in public places,” he claimed.