Google released mobility data for few key indicators based on activity levels (using location information) in grocery/pharmacy stores, workplaces, parks, residential places, retail/recreation and transit stations.

The baseline day is the median value from the 5‑week period Jan 3 – Feb 6, 2020 as reported in the Help page. Consider a data row:

{
  "sub_region_1": "India",
  "date": "2020-03-10",
  "retail_and_recreation_percent_change_from_baseline": -19,
  "grocery_and_pharmacy_percent_change_from_baseline": -23,
  "parks_percent_change_from_baseline": -4,
  "transit_stations_percent_change_from_baseline": -22,
  "workplaces_percent_change_from_baseline": -44,
  "residential_percent_change_from_baseline": 11
}

Place categories

Place categories as reported in documentation are as follows:

  • Grocery & Pharmacy: places like grocery markets, food warehouses, farmers markets, specialty food shops, drug stores, pharmacies.
  • Parks: local parks, national parks, public beaches, marinas, dog parks, plazas, public gardens
  • Transit stations: subway, bus, train stations
  • Retail & recreation: restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, theme parks, libraries, museums, movie theatres.

Key data aspects

  • Numbers represent the rate of change of activity on 10th March 2020 against the baseline day’s activity.
  • Except Residential activity all activity is measured as change in number of visitors.
  • Residential activity is measured by the duration of time spent at homes.

Visual

  • Each row represents a region (ex: Kerala).
  • Each column represents a day (ex: April 15).
  • Each heatmap cell represents variation of an activity (ex: workplaces) on a single day captured by color.
  • As India enforced lockdown all activities fell except that of residential homes. People followed janata curfew as requested by the Prime Minister on 22nd March as a precursor to the lockdown on 25th March. Activity patterns began to change since 22nd March.

Without Jammu and Kashmir

Jammu and Kashmir looks like an outlier in all its activities except residential perhaps owing to prolonged lockdown since August 2019 following the removal of article 370. Below is the activity map without Jammu and Kashmir when changes are more striking.

Notes

  • data cells (region on a date) with null values are ignored and will have empty cells in the heatmap.
  • Lakshadweep has data available for only parks and workplace activities.
  • Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Jammu & Kashmir have null values for certain days for different activities.
  • Report data as on 2020-05-14 as reported by Google Mobility reports.

Update

6 June

  • Updated data from June 3 reports.
  • Added a Place Cateogries section.
  • Jammu and Kashmir
    • Grocery activity levels seem to have gone back to pre-lockdown levels
    • Retail/Recreation and Transit station activities are picking up; not yet near pre-lockdown levels
    • people continue to stay longer durations at home
  • Rest regions
    • Retail/Recreation continues to have lower levels of activity than in Jan-Feb (baseline).
    • Grocery/Pharmacy
      • from May 11, Kerala has seen better activity levels in Grocery and Pharmacy barring Sundays.
      • regions with closer to or higher than pre-lockdown activity levels include Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Rajasthan.
      • regions with improved activity levels but not as close as pre-lockdown levels include Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand.
    • Parks continues to have lower levels of activity than in Jan-Feb (baseline).
    • Transit stations
      • Himachal Pradesh and Mizoram have seen slight improvement but not near pre-lockdown activity levels.
    • Workplaces
      • Last week, Lakshadweep was the closest to baseline in the past two months.
      • Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim show improvement in activity levels.
    • Residential
      • Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh and Mizoram have seen reduced duration of time spent in residential places.

1 June

24 May

  • Updated data from May 21 reports.
  • Either due to change in browser behavior or due to change in data size fetch() failed citing CORS issue. I now use cors anywhere app to fetch JSONs hosted on github gists.
  • EVen with no change in date format, Vega seem to format date as epoch instead of the custom format. I changed "format": {"parse": "auto", "type": "json"} to "format": {"parse": {"start": "date", "end": "date"}} where start, end are annotation fields.