Report: Hong Kong sees massive travelling shifts amid COVID-19 pandemic

As governments around the world enact public health strategies - such as social distancing to minimise personal contact - in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the mobility of their citizens has significantly decreased. To gain a better understanding of the changes to people's movement, Google has compiled a report revealing mobility changes in Hong Kong and the wider world.

Google's ongoing "COVID-19 Community Mobility Report" leverages aggregated yet anonymised data to chart movement trends over time by geography, across different location categories such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residences. The data shows how visits and the length of stays between 16 February to 29 March at various places compare to a baseline. The median value was for the corresponding day of the week, during a five-week period between 3 January to 6 February.

Google calculated the results based on data from users who have opted-in to share the location history for their Google accounts. However, no personally identifiable information - such as an individual’s location, contacts, or movement - was made available at any point.

Mobility trends for retail and recreation places - such as restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theatres - decreased by 35% compared to the baseline. Meanwhile, the drop in categories for parks (including national parks, public beaches, marinas, dog parks, plazas, and public gardens) and transit stations (such as subway, bus, and train stations) was more significant, decreasing by 43% and 45% respectively.

As for the grocery and pharmacy category, mobility trends for places like grocery markets, food warehouses, farmers markets, specialty food shops, drug stores, and pharmacies, had decreased by a far smaller 7%. 

Lastly, the widespread policy of companies allowing or requiring employees to work from home has meant the mobility trend for workplaces had dropped by 24% accordingly. Not surprisingly, as people have been asked to stay in their homes, mobility trends for places of residence showed an increased of 16%, the only category that recorded an increase.

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