COVID-19 is spatial: Ensuring that mobile Big Data is used for social good

Abstract

The mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in the biggest disruption to individual mobilities in modern times. The crisis is clearly spatial in nature, and examining the geographical aspect is important in understanding the broad implications of the pandemic. The avalanche of mobile Big Data makes it possible to study the spatial effects of the crisis with spatiotemporal detail at the national and global scales. However, the current crisis also highlights serious limitations in the readiness to take the advantage of mobile Big Data for social good, both within and beyond the interests of health sector. We propose two strategical pathways for the future use of mobile Big Data for societal impact assessment, addressing access to both raw mobile Big Data as well as aggregated data products. Both pathways require careful considerations of privacy issues, harmonized and transparent methodologies, and attention to the representativeness, reliability and continuity of data. The goal is to be better prepared to use mobile Big Data in future crises.

Escaping from Cities during the COVID-19 Crisis: Using Mobile Phone Data to Trace Mobility in Finland

“…Finally, our study demonstrated how mobile phone data could be used to provide important insights across spatial scales and prolonged time periods that are able to support situational awareness [35,42,49]. In particular, we demonstrated how inherently dynamic social phenomenon of multi-local living could be revealed and timely monitored with data products of mobile network operators.…”

“…These include the varying spatial and temporal resolutions of each data source [48] and difficulties to integrate them to reveal mobility dynamics on relevant scales [35]. Furthermore, access to data, the capacity to process complex data and establish the necessary interdisciplinary teams and collaborations, lack of political will, and concerns about data privacy and protection have remained challenges, and hindered widespread use of mobile phone data in operational decision making [42,49].…”

“…Providing these insights is valuable for a rapid crisis management and, thus, timeliness of such data products is the key strength of big data analytics compared to traditional data collection options, such as conducting surveys and using registers. Nevertheless, several challenges in using given data products remain, including data access and privacy protection addressed by recent studies [49], and additional challenges emerge due to undisclosed methodologies, such as diversity of datasets, incoherent terminologies, population representativeness, and differences in what exactly data are representing.…”

The association between socioeconomic status and mobility reductions in the early stage of England’s COVID-19 epidemic

“…This study has used mobile phone data to provide rigorous evidence for an link between socioeconomic status (SES) with mobility reduction during the Spring 2020 lockdown in England, while considering the potentially confounding effects of other factors and “recognising the fundamental spatiality of the current COVID-19 crisis” (Poom et al, 2020, p. 5). Two main conclusions can be drawn along with a future research direction.…”

What about Time-Geography in the post-Covid-19 era?

“…As emphasised by Poom et al (2020), the current global crisis is clearly spatial in nature -the virus outbreak, hot spots, mitigation measures, closed borders, quarantines and related societal impacts are all profoundly about distance, separation and space. This has offered geographers opportunities for analyses of the relevant issues through a geographic lens and predestined them to play a significant role in the fight against the pandemic (see Aalberset et al, 2020;Rose-Redwood et al, 2020).…”