COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports

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When Google first published its community mobility reports in 2020, I – like many others – rushed to try and do something with it. I decided to use it as a pretext to build a Shiny app with time controls on a Leaflet map. I was surprised how easy it was to implement a time series animation with Shiny by simply setting the animate argument for the sliderInput. I used cronR to create a cron job for the daily execution of a script that loads and processes the data. In this way, the app can show the most recent data and still fire up without too much delay.¹

Even if you are – quite understandably – no longer much inclined to spend your precious time on COVID-19 data yet again, this dataset provides insight that often goes beyond the impact of the pandemic, e.g.:

• Quite obviously, the Parks layer is a nice indicator of good weather conditions, but it also clearly illustrates the distinction between a strict curfew imposed and a soft lockdown – leaving little else to do but to take a walk in the park;
• Mobile internet blackouts, such as in the aftermath of the Belarusian presidential election on August 10, 2020 or around the Ugandan general election on January 14, 2021, are clearly visible in the data as “decreased mobility”;
• It’s also easy to spot national holidays in the Retail and Recreation Layer.