Socio-economic indicators correlate with daily mobility during the second-wave of the Covid-19 pandemic

Jed Long and Chang Ren

No tca34, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Non-pharmaceutical interventions are being used globally to limit the spread of Covid-19, which are in turn affecting individual mobility patterns. Mobility measures were found to be strongly associated with regional socio-economic indicators during the first wave of the pandemic. Here, we use network mobility data from an ~3.5 million person sample of individuals in Ontario, Canada to study the association between three different individual-mobility measures and four socio-economic indicators throughout the first and second wave of Covid-19 (January to December 2020). We demonstrate that understanding how mobility behaviours have changed in response to Covid-19 varies considerably depending on how mobility is measured. We find a strong positive association between different mobility levels and the economic deprivation index, which demonstrates that inequities in the changes to mobility across economic gradients observed during the initial lockdown have persisted into the later stages of the pandemic. However, the associations between mobility and other socio-economic indicators vary over time. We capture a strong day-of-week pattern of association between socio-economic indicators and mobility levels. Our findings have important implications for understanding if and how mobility data should be used to study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on the socio-economic conditions across geographical space, and over time. Our results support that Covid-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions have resulted in geographically disparate responses to mobility behaviour, and quantifying mobility changes at fine geographical scales is crucial to understanding the impacts of Covid-19 on local populations.

Date: 2021-02-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:tca34

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/tca34

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