Nearly Half of Britons Still Visited ‘Workplaces’, Google Data Suggests

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) — As many as 45pc of Britons continued to visit their “workplaces” in the last few days compared to the same time a month ago, according to a vast new data set made public by Google that tracks movement on billions of people around the world.

The internet search giant published data showing how people around the world are moving amid the coronavirus crisis. The Google COVID-19 Mobility Report, launched on Friday, shows data on how people are traveling compared to the average in 131 countries.

The anonymous and aggregated data, meaning it cannot be tracked back to any one user, shows a sudden drop movement over the past week as Britain effectively shut down with people ordered to stay at home.

According to Google, visits to “retail and recreation” venues, such as restaurants, cafes, shopping centers, and museums had fallen more than 85pc compared to normal as of Sunday, the last available data.

Visits to places of public transport had fallen 75pc compared to normal, trips to essential shops for groceries or the pharmacy were down 46pc and trips to the park had fallen 52pc.

However, despite the government urging people to work from home where they can, around 45pc of people who travel to work were still visiting their “places of work” compared to normal, according to the data, a fall of just over half from the baseline.

Google said it had collected the data from individuals with their location history on their smartphones. From this data, it is able to calculate where individuals are spending their time and estimate their workplace. This information is anonymized in the published set.

Google said: “While we display a percentage point increase or decrease in visits, we do not share the absolute number of visits. To protect people’s privacy, no personally identifiable information, like an individual’s location, contacts or movement, is made available at any point.” Similar data is used by its Google Maps service to show busy times at restaurants or road traffic.

The US company said such information could be used by Governments to monitor how effective social distancing measures were being. The data is also available down to a regional or city-wide level, meaning if there was a need for a localized lockdown, that too could be monitored.

While the data shows a marked fall in most travel, it does reveal many people still having to travel for work. There are more than a million people who work for the NHS and millions of people in essential grocery, food production, factories, police and other key roles who are expected to report to work if they can.

But the data suggests nearly half of all roles are still requiring people to travel for work.

Concern over who should be staying at home has led to political division. Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has repeatedly warned too many people are going in to work in the city each day, while the Government has said more public transport needs to remain open to transport key workers. The data shows that Londoner’s workers are in fact staying home more than average, just only 38pc still traveling to work.

In Italy, one of the hardest-hit places by the virus, visits to workplaces had fallen 63pc, while visits to the park were down 90pc.