Thread by @juliette_io

Lockdown lite?

Has Sydney's lockdown been too lax?

We have Mobility Data up to Wed 1 July. It gives a picture of people's movements in the first 5 days of #Sydneylockdown

Heads up, to understand these charts there are a few tweets of pre-reading ...

#nswcovid #covidnsw
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In the middle of the y-axis, you'll see the number 0

This is the baseline of movement in the community

Baseline = the 'normal' amount of movement on a particular day of the week

Movement on Sundays is different from Wednesdays, so each day has its own normalised baseline

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Google has calculated 'normal' for each day of the week, by finding each day's median throughout a 5-week period from *3 January to 6 February 2020*

That means we need to keep in mind the seasonal and local characteristics of each state during that time of year

E.g. Look at mobility in parks in the NT recently

Movement is shown as a % compared with the baseline (thin grey line)

It's much higher - up to 134% higher! That shows ppl enjoying NT's dry season, compared with wet season in Jan

You can also see NT's lockdown start

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In contrast, here is TAS

Movement in parks is well below the baseline - down to -54%. Apparently June in Tassie is a bit chillier than January and parks aren't as appealing

(sorry, the dates are displaying as MM/DD/YY :-/)

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Let's look at NSW

Our baseline is summer holidays. That really skews 'normal' movement in workplaces and homes

So let's focus on other areas

Here is movement in retail / recreation

Compare the recent dip (-31%) with April 2020 (-49%), Aug '20 (-20%), Jan '21 (-20%)

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Here is movement in grocery and pharmacy

We were just about on baseline (-1%), so overall statewide movement in these areas was about the same as a normal summer's day

But remember, only ~65% of the state in lockdown, so likely below baseline in these areas, but not by much

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It's also helpful to compare NSW v VIC's recent lockdown

VIC was more strict and state-wide. So keep that in mind when comparing

NSW might have dropped significantly in retail / recreation, but VIC says 'That's not a lockdown. This is a lockdown' (-51%)

#COVID19Vic
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There was a similar difference in grocery and pharmacy.

NSW dropped to -1%; VIC dropped to -10%

The state-wide metric gives us an idea, but is probably too crude. The next step is obviously to look at these data in LGAs. This is coming ...

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In the meantime, I encourage you to draw your own conclusions from these charts and use the interactive version that's at the bottom of the homepage here -
covid19data.com.au

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