Data-Driven Modeling Reveals the Impact of Stay-at-Home Orders on Human Mobility during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S

Xiong, Chenfeng; Hu, Songhua; Yang, Mofeng; Younes, Hannah N; Luo, Weiyu; Ghader, Sepehr; Zhang, Lei

One approach to delay the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is to reduce human travel by imposing travel restriction policies. It is yet unclear how effective those policies are on suppressing the mobility trend due to the lack of ground truth and large-scale dataset describing human mobility during the pandemic. This study uses real-world location-based service data collected from anonymized mobile devices to uncover mobility changes during COVID-19 and under the 'Stay-at-home' state orders in the U.S. The study measures human mobility with two important metrics: daily average number of trips per person and daily average person-miles traveled. The data-driven analysis and modeling attribute less than 5% of the reduction in the number of trips and person-miles traveled to the effect of the policy. The models developed in the study exhibit high prediction accuracy and can be applied to inform epidemics modeling with empirically verified mobility trends and to support time-sensitive decision-making processes.