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Christmas week did not represent, for the Portuguese, a time of great changes in their mobility patterns, despite living in a pandemic. This is what the analysis of the PSE consultancy, specialized in data science, shows and what its director, Nuno Santos also says: “In general, it was a week identical to any other week, with very high mobility on weekdays, and less on holidays and weekends, although Christmas Day was more mobile than a normal holiday. “
After having already revealed information for December 23 and 24, the data for the rest of the Christmas week allow us to draw a clearer picture of how the Portuguese reacted to the greater openness in travel, allowed by the Government, for that period.
From the beginning, the 25th, which has been the most mobile of the four most recent holidays. That day, 20% of the Portuguese traveled more than 20 kilometers, when on the other holidays in December (1 and 8) and November (1), this percentage had not exceeded 13%.
Last year, the percentage of trips in this category had been higher (28% of the population), which the consultant attributes to two factors: “The lower value this year is due, on the one hand, to a slightly lower amount of people on the move and, on the other hand, that last year Christmas was a Wednesday (and not the eve of the sixth weekend) ”.
In other words, to the people who chose not to visit relatives in other places, we must add the people who did not return home on Christmas Day, taking advantage of the long weekend. That is exactly what Nuno Santos explains. “It is completely different to have a day 26 on a Thursday, as it happened last year, which is already a working day, or a Saturday. This allowed the return home to be more distributed, ”he says.
That the Portuguese did not give up celebrating Christmas outside the home, with family and friends, is also shown by the analysis of the night-time confinement, between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. With the suspension of the curfew at 11 at night, at Christmas, the Portuguese took advantage, and the early morning of the 25 was the day with the least closure in the last two months (89.3%, the only value below 90% from November 1).
As of the weekend of December 26 and 27, the data indicates that “the mobility of the Portuguese was, in general, similar” to the other weekends this month. And the greatest confinement that was felt in those two days was not achieved at the cost of the longest trips, but of those who abdicated making trips less than 10 kilometers from their homes, that is, short trips.
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The mandatory curfew at 1pm, in the riskiest counties, returned on Sunday, but there were not as many Portuguese to do it as in the previous ones, it was only 59%, when in the previous week it had been 63%. However, the PSE recalls that the number of municipalities with high and extreme risk, subject to this confinement, has been decreasing, so this percentage has also been decreasing “every fortnight.”
The analysis of the consultancy, which uses a mobile application to carry out a continuous collection of data by monitoring the location and the means of travel, from a panel of 3,670 people, also allows us to understand where the people who perform longer trips. Celebrate Christmas.
According to data from the consultancy, 45% of the trips that exceed 50 kilometers for this celebration originated in the Metropolitan Area (AM) of Lisbon, and 20% in the AM of Porto. It is also in AML where there is a “greater propensity” to make trips considered “very long haul”. PSE says that “15% of AML residents traveled more than 100 kilometers to spend Christmas.”
And those who had to do these longer routes preferred to leave on December 23. According to the data revealed this Monday, 8% of the Portuguese, compared to 11% last year. The slight decrease in people who did not spend Christmas away from home is also visible in the PSE numbers: “On December 24, 2019, 20% of the Portuguese slept more than 50 kilometers from their habitual residence. In 2020, that percentage was 16% ”, says the document.
The difference between those who went to sleep more than 30 kilometers from home at Christmas in 2019 and 2020 is even smaller: from 25% in 2019, the percentage dropped to 23% this year.
The PSE Mobility Index for the week of December 21 to 27 also shows that the days before Christmas had a “higher” mobility than the average of the beginning of the year, in the pre-pandemic period, with 24 still having high values ( 88%, when it had been 98% in 2019). Then the Portuguese moved less, or in a more distributed way, as already mentioned. Days 25 (holiday) and 27 (Sunday) were the week with the highest percentage of confinement: on those days, 55% did not leave the house.
