Lockdown for COVID-19 and its impact on community mobility in India: An analysis of the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, 2020

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a novel public health problem threatening the whole world. As an upshot, countrywide lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic has been supportive of changing community mobility trends of various place categories including retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential in India. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the impact of lockdown for COVID-19 on community mobility using spatial time-series change over different states and union territories (UTs) of India. DATA & METHODS: This study has been organized based on states & UTs wise time-series data of the daily percentage of change of community mobility from baseline in India, collected from 15th February to 30th April 2020. Conditional formatting techniques, time-series trends plotting method, spatial inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation mapping techniques have been employed to show pre and post lockdown mobility trends due to COVID-19 i.e. to fulfill the objective. RESULTS: Across India, retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, visits to parks, transit stations, and workplaces mobility dropped by −73.4%, −51.2%, −46.3%, −66% and −56.7% respectively. Visits to residential places mobility increased by 23.8% as people mostly stayed home during the lockdown. The COVID-19 lockdown started on 24 March 2020 and just gone one day (March 25, 2020) of the beginning of lockdown, there have a decreased in percentage (−70.51% in retail and recreation mobility), (−64.26% in grocery and pharmacy mobility), (−46.17% in parks mobility), (−65.6% in transit stations mobility), (−60.03% in workplaces mobility) from baseline in compared to the pre-lockdown period and residential mobility has been increased in percentage (26.32%) from baseline due to people stayed home during the lockdown for COVID-19 pandemic in India. CONCLUSION: Study figures out mobility trends over time during pre-lockdown and after lockdown period across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential, which can be used in public health strategies to drop the spread of COVID-19.