Predictability of human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

Publication date: Aug 01, 2024

Human mobility is fundamental to a range of applications including epidemic control, urban planning, and traffic engineering. While laws governing individual movement trajectories and population flows across locations have been extensively studied, the predictability of population-level mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic driven by specific activities such as work, shopping, and recreation remains elusive. Here we analyze mobility data for six place categories at the US county level from 2020 February 15 to 2021 November 23 and measure how the predictability of these mobility metrics changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. We quantify the time-varying predictability in each place category using an information-theoretic metric, permutation entropy. We find disparate predictability patterns across place categories over the course of the pandemic, suggesting differential behavioral changes in human activities perturbed by disease outbreaks. Notably, predictability change in foot traffic to residential locations is mostly in the opposite direction to other mobility categories. Specifically, visits to residences had the highest predictability during stay-at-home orders in March 2020, while visits to other location types had low predictability during this period. This pattern flipped after the lifting of restrictions during summer 2020. We identify four key factors, including weather conditions, population size, COVID-19 case growth, and government policies, and estimate their nonlinear effects on mobility predictability. Our findings provide insights on how people change their behaviors during public health emergencies and may inform improved interventions in future epidemics.

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Concepts Keywords
Covid COVID-19
February epidemics
Pandemic human behavior
Traffic human mobility
predictability

Semantics

Type Source Name
disease MESH COVID-19 pandemic
disease VO population
disease VO time
disease MESH emergencies
disease VO USA
disease MESH infectious diseases
disease VO frequency
disease IDO history
disease IDO country
drug DRUGBANK Coenzyme M
disease VO Viruses
disease VO device
drug DRUGBANK Spinosad
disease MESH bile
drug DRUGBANK Fenamole
disease MESH infection
drug DRUGBANK Indoleacetic acid
disease VO Optaflu
drug DRUGBANK Serine
drug DRUGBANK Trestolone
disease VO monthly
disease IDO local infection
drug DRUGBANK Methionine
disease VO Pla
disease MESH uncertainty
disease VO effective
disease VO efficient
drug DRUGBANK Succimer
disease MESH influenza
disease MESH malaria
pathway KEGG Malaria
disease MESH dengue
drug DRUGBANK L-Citrulline
disease IDO intervention
disease IDO process
disease VO report
drug DRUGBANK Delorazepam
disease VO Canada

Original Article

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