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03rd Apr 2020

Google publishes a county-by-county guide showing huge fall in physical movement in Ireland

Alan Loughnane

Google location data Covid-19

The company said no personally identifiable information will be made available.

Google has released location data gathered from smartphones to help public health officials understand how people’s movements have changed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The data, which includes data from every county in Ireland, will allow the government to establish how effective social distancing measures have been during the month of March.

The Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports website shows population data trends in six categories; retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, workplaces and residential.

It shows mobility trends in retail and recreation across Ireland are down 81%, while trends for parks are down 59%.

Meanwhile, transit stations are down 78% across the country and work places are down 52%.

“As global communities respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing emphasis on public health strategies, like social distancing measures, to slow the rate of transmission,” Google said in a blog post.

“In Google Maps, we use aggregated, anonymised data showing how busy certain types of places are — helping identify when a local business tends to be the most crowded. We have heard from public health officials that this same type of aggregated, anonymised data could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat Covid-19.”

Google says the data will be collected in aggregate, rather than at an individual level, and it will use percentages to illustrate the trends of the public.

It will only use data of those who have agreed to share their location with Google – similar to how Google Maps detects traffic on routes – and no personally identifiable information will be made available.

Users can visit the webpage and enter a region at which point a PDF will be generated for them to study.

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