Mobile phone data analytics against the COVID-19 epidemics in Italy: flow diversity and local job markets during the national lockdown

Bonato P., Cintia P., Fabbri F., Fadda D., Giannotti F., Lopalco P. L., Mazzilli S., Nanni M., Pappalardo L., Pedreschi D., Penone F., Rinzivillo S., Rossetti G., Savarese M., Tavoschi L.

COVID-19  Human mobility  Data science  Epidemics  Mobile phone data 

Understanding human mobility patterns is crucial to plan the restart of production and economic activities, which are currently put in "stand-by" to fight the diffusion of the epidemics. A recent analysis shows that, following the national lockdown of March 9th, the mobility fluxes have decreased by 50% or more, everywhere in the country. To this purpose, we use mobile phone data to compute the movements of people between Italian provinces, and we analyze the incoming, outcoming and internal mobility flows before and during the national lockdown (March 9th, 2020) and after the closure of non-necessary productive and economic activities (March 23th, 2020). The population flow across provinces and municipalities enable for the modeling of a risk index tailored for the mobility of each municipality or province. Such an index would be a useful indicator to drive counter-measures in reaction to a sudden reactivation of the epidemics. Mobile phone data, even when aggregated to preserve the privacy of individuals, are a useful data source to track the evolution in time of human mobility, hence allowing for monitoring the effectiveness of control measures such as physical distancing. In this report, we address the following analytical questions: How does the mobility structure of a territory change? Do incoming and outcoming flows become more predictable during the lockdown, and what are the differences between weekdays and weekends? Can we detect proper local job markets based on human mobility flows, to eventually shape the borders of a local outbreak?

Source: ISTI Technical Reports 005/2020, 2020

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