Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed novel risks related to the indoor mixing of individuals from different households and challenged policymakers to adequately regulate this behaviour. While in many cases household visits are necessary for the purpose of social care, they have been linked to broadening community transmission of the virus. In this study we propose a novel, privacy-preserving framework for the measurement of household visitation at national and regional scales, making use of passively collected mobility data. We implement this approach in England from January 2020 to May 2021. The measures expose significant spatial and temporal variation in household visitation patterns, impacted by both national and regional lockdown policies, and the rollout of the vaccination programme. The findings point to complex social processes unfolding differently over space and time, likely informed by variations in policy adherence, vaccine relaxation, and regional interventions.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed novel risks related to the indoor mixing of individuals from different households and challenged policymakers to adequately regulate this behaviour
We consider the extent of household visitation in two main ways—its evolution over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic across the whole of England, and in response to policy and medical interventions; and its variation over space, reflecting regional and land-use trends and regional policy contexts
The principle that human interaction in confined spaces is fundamental to the propagation of COVID-19 has been well established, as has the notion that aggregate mobility data can point to instances of risky behaviour associated with its transmission
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed novel risks related to the indoor mixing of individuals from different households and challenged policymakers to adequately regulate this behaviour. In this study we propose a novel, privacy-preserving framework for the measurement of household visitation at national and regional scales, making use of passively collected mobility data We implement this approach in England from January 2020 to May 2021. England has suffered successive NPI restrictions over a sustained period, punctuated by multiple ‘national lockdown’ periods spanning March–May 2020, November–December 2020, and January-March 2021, where health restrictions were the same nationally (see Supplementary Materials 1) These and intervening periods offer the opportunity to study the varied effects of human behaviours including ‘lockdown fatigue’[5] across a large population sample, through the proxies of measured human mobility and its subsets over time. This study proposes a novel framework for the identification of visits by de-identified individuals to non-home households This metric is derived through mobile phone trajectory data, and by extracting mobility behaviours of this type, we are able to derive an indicator of ‘household mixing’ by location and time. Our study focuses on England prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
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