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Anonymous mobile data shows a diminishing willingness to reduce contacts over a longer period of time. The Austrians are already moving again as in the “soft lockdown” of early November.
The path from the soft lock to the hard lock and then back to the de facto renewed “soft lock” over the last few weeks can be clearly seen in the mobility behavior of the Austrians. In the first days of shopping, there was a clear but not excessive increase in mobile phone movement data. In any case, autumn is a far cry from mobility reductions in spring, experts explain.
In analyzes of anonymized data on the average distances traveled in Austria in the first blockade before the summer, a real decrease in mobility could be seen in Austria. Based on the information on which mobile phones are dialing which mobile phone antennas through the SIM card throughout the day, the group of citizens who traveled more than one kilometer a day fell from 73 to 45 percent. This was the result of ongoing evaluations based on information from the A1 telecommunications company by the spin-off of the Technical University (TU) Graz, Invenium.
After this image approached long-term normal values again in the summer, with the soft lock on November 3, there was a notable decline to around 63 percent and more for this mobility group. Then, on the first day of the harsh lockdown (November 17), it fell to around 56 percent.
In the last days of closure, however, there was “a slight increase”, according to Mario Mayerthaler of A1 and Michael Cik of Invenium. The values of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week now “almost correspond to the time of soft blockade”, with more than 65 percent in the group of “mobile people”, according to experts who have been providing information to authorities since the start of the crown crisis.
Austrians are tired
Even in the phases of greater reduction of contact, a certain “tiredness” can be recognized in the population on the basis of evident increases in mobility, according to Cik. That should be evident again now, because on Wednesday (December 9) it was already 68 percent a little higher than the average soft lock, the traffic scientist explained: “I’m also curious to see how things will continue in the other days of December goes “.
At least for the first potentially difficult Christmas shopping days, under the now almost soft lockdown, it can be seen that the dreaded total rush towards a few miles of shopping has not materialized, even if this may not match subjective perception here and there. , as Mayerthaler admitted. In Vienna’s Mariahilfer Strasse, Stephansplatz and Graben and in the inner cities of Innsbruck or Salzburg, there was again a lot of activity on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the number of people was only about half of the comparable Christmas shopping days of the year past.
Clearly visible exit restriction
This is also due to the fact that there are no options to stay at the punch stalls and in the catering trade, exit restrictions are clearly visible from 8:00 pm at night, and tourists are absent. The peak is thus continuously around noon and early afternoon. In general, it could be said that people frequent shopping streets less and more shopping centers, according to Cik.
In general, you may find a certain “get used to” effect. In view of the mobility data, they are far from completely closing the country. The now less significant slowdown in contacts is also reflected in the number of cases that declines less sharply. According to Cik, the lagged relationship between movement data and infection data is staggeringly large over the course of the pandemic. “The question will be if the current mobility is enough to reduce the number of cases for the future,” said Mayerthaler ahead of the Christmas holidays.
(SERVICE – https://invenium.io/de)
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