In an unprecedented move, Google has publicly released a series of COVID-19 Community Mobility Maps, utilizing location history data from users round the world to present insights into how people are traveling local communities. the info is presented to spotlight how social distancing and shelter in situ measures are changing people’s behaviors.

Each report looks at mobility trends across six categories: Retail & Recreation (cafes, museums, etc), Grocery & Pharmacy, Parks (including public parks and national parks), Transit Stations, Workplaces, and Residential.

Each country report is additionally weakened by individual states or provinces. The us reports are a touch more granular, with individual PDF reports for every specific state allowing more detailed county by county breakdowns.

In a blog post explaining the general public data release, Senior vice chairman of Maps Jen Fitzpatrick and Chief Health Officer of Google Health Karen DeSalvo suggest the knowledge is meant to assist public health officials better understand the efficacy of local measures.

“For example, this information could help officials understand changes in essential trips which will shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings,” the blog post explains. “Similarly, persistent visits to transportation hubs might indicate the necessity to feature additional buses or trains so as to permit people that got to travel room to opened up for social distancing.”

Google is keen to worry this aggregated data is anonymized to form sure no user data can identify a selected person’s movements. Google also notes this data is merely collected from users who have turned on their Location History setting, an opt-in setting that’s transitioned by default.

“While we display a decimal point increase or decrease in visits, we don’t share absolutely the number of visits,” the blog post says. “To protect people’s privacy, no personally identifiable information, like an individual’s location, contacts or movement, is formed available at any point.”

While the info is undeniably fascinating, illustrating how significantly population movements have shifted in some regions over a brief period of your time , it’s unclear if these reports offer enough specificity to be of any real use to local public health officials.

In countries that are several weeks into strict stay-at-home lockdowns the reports certainly indicate significant behavior changes. Italy, for instance , shows a 94 percent drop by retail and recreation behaviors, and an 87-percent drop by visits to transit stations. Sweden, on the opposite hand, a rustic that controversially has yet to declare a robust lockdown, shows only a 24-percent drop by retail and recreation behaviors, and a striking 43-percent rise in park visitations.