COVID-19 Impact Monitor reveals UK population moves drops by 98%

The Oxford COVID-19 Impact Monitor has already revealed how life in the UK has changed since the Coronavirus outbreak:

• Population movement has dropped by 98% since the beginning of March
• 55% of Britons stayed at home on Easter Monday
• Despite a surge in COVID-19 hospital admissions, overall hospital footfall has fallen by 80%
• The least busiest time to visit a supermarket is Tuesday at 9 am
• 19 million Britons are the most at risk of COVID-19 because of age and underlying health conditions
• The flow of people between regions in the UK has tumbled by 76%

To allay privacy concerns the Oxford COVID-19 Impact Monitor only uses anonymized and aggregated mobile phone location data. This GDPR-compliant data is then used to power interactive digital dashboards that can help policymakers, clinicians and the general public to understand better the impact of COVID-19 on the NHS and the wider community. The online dashboards are free and publicly available, together with key insights from the data. Analyses can be carried out at different degrees of geographic detail, including at the local and regional levels, and also for specific NHS hospital catchment areas.

Commenting on the launch of the new tool, Dr. Adam Saunders says: "The monitoring of population movements in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has received considerable attention following its use in China, South Korea and Singapore, the countries where the virus impacted earliest. The team came together to do what we could to help tackle the challenge facing the UK through the use of ethical big data analytics for the public good."

Dr. Matthias Qian adds: "Getting insights from big data is key if the UK is effectively to fight coronavirus, whilst at the same time making costly measures such as social distancing work as efficiently as possible. Fully anonymized and aggregated mobile phone location data provides a responsible approach for revealing important insights for the NHS, the government and the wider public, which can help save lives."