COVID-19 lockdown introduces human mobility pattern changes for both Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao greater bay area and the San Francisco bay area

Leiyang Zhong; Ying Zhou; Song Gao; Zhaoyang Yu; Zhifeng Ma; Xiaoming Li; Yang Yue; Jizhe Xia

doi:10.1016/j.jag.2022.102848

COVID-19 lockdown introduces human mobility pattern changes for both Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao greater bay area and the San Francisco bay area

Int J Appl Earth Obs Geoinf. 2022 Aug:112:102848. doi: 10.1016/j.jag.2022.102848. Epub 2022 Jun 20.

Authors

Leiyang Zhong^{1

2}, Ying Zhou³, Song Gao⁴, Zhaoyang Yu^{1

2}, Zhifeng Ma^{1

2}, Xiaoming Li^{1

2}, Yang Yue^{1

2}, Jizhe Xia^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Guangdong Key Laboratory of Urban Informatics, and Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Spatial Smart Sensing and Service, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
² Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), Key Laboratory for Geo-Environmental Monitoring of Great Bay Area, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
³ College of Public Health, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China.
⁴ Geospatial Data Science Lab, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.

Abstract

In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, various countries have sought to control COVID-19 transmission by introducing non-pharmaceutical interventions. Restricting population mobility, by introducing social distancing, is one of the most widely used non-pharmaceutical interventions. Although similar population mobility restriction interventions were introduced, their impacts on COVID-19 transmission are often inconsistent across different regions and different time periods. These differences may provide critical information for tailoring COVID-19 control strategies. In this paper, anonymized high spatiotemporal resolution mobile-phone location data were employed to empirically analyze and quantify the impact of lockdowns on population mobility. Both the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) in China and the San Francisco Bay Area (SBA) in the United States were studied. In response to the lockdowns, a general reduction in population mobility was observed, but the structural changes in mobility are very different between the two bays: 1) GBA mobility decreased by approximately 74.0-80.1% while the decrease of SBA was about 25.0-42.1%; 2) compared to SBA, the GBA had smoother volatility in daily volume during the lockdown. The volatility change indexes for GBA and SBA were 2.55% and 7.52%, respectively; 3) the effect of lockdown on short- to long-distance mobility was similar in GBA while the medium- and long-distance impact was more pronounced in SBA.

Keywords: COVID-19; Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area; Human mobility; Non-pharmaceutical interventions; San Francisco Bay Area; Spatiotemporal pattern discovery.