ODI Covid-19 Project

“Agent-based models are particularly good in situations where you need to explicitly model the interactions and the behaviour of the individual components of a system,” says Nick Malleson, a professor of spatial science at the University of Leeds, who has worked with Improbable to study crime patterns. “I think the reason that they've become popular for [studying] disease spread is that very often in a disease spread, you might need to look at how people are interacting – when they come into contact in shops, how the social networks affect how people move, how they behave, how they interact, all these kinds of things.”

Health chiefs in the UK have tasked a team of software developers to “investigate” switching its unique contact-tracing app to the global standard proposed by Apple and Google, signalling a potential about-turn just days after the NHS launched its new coronavirus app. 

A YouGov poll has found eight out of 10 people would prefer the government to prioritise health and wellbeing over economic growth during the coronavirus crisis, and six in 10 would still want the government to pursue health and wellbeing ahead of growth after the pandemic has subsided, though nearly a third would prioritise the economy instead at that point.

The focus on GDP means economic growth can take place at the expense of the environment, and people’s quality of life, without any of the resulting damages ever being taken into account, the report argues. That in turn encourages ministers and officials to seek ways of raising the GDP figures, even if rising nominal growth is accompanied by environmental degradation, worsening health, poor educational attainment and increasing poverty.

These reports are based on similar analysis carried out on Italian data Pepe E. et al. 2020 and US data Klein B. et al. 2020. We aim to provide and assess the changes in commuting and mobility at local authority level across UK during the COVID-19 health crisis.

For example, this information could help officials understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings.

Ultimately, understanding not only whether people are traveling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of communities.

The Community Mobility Reports are powered by the same world-class anonymization technology that we use in our products every day. For these reports, we use differential privacy, which adds artificial noise to our datasets enabling high quality results without identifying any individual person.