We would like to answer the question by means of the graph below. Austria’s mobility behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic

Austrian average mobility before the first lockdown in March was around 73 percent during the week, dropping to around 46 percent during the first lockdown.

Mobility increased again with the first lockdown and the opening of school in May, and has returned to near normal levels over the summer. It did not quite reach the levels seen before COVID-19, but it was very close at 70 percent. Weekend mobility also returned to levels above 50 percent. However, with the “soft” lockdown starting November 03, mobility dropped again, including weekends. This may have had to do with the renewed closure of food service establishments. During the “soft” lockdown, around 63% of Austrians were on the road. With the renewed “hard” lockdown, mobility dropped further to an average of 57%.

During the two lockdowns, there was also a sharp drop in the mobility of public transport in urban and long-distance traffic – in March by around 80 percent and currently by around 60 to 70 percent. Thus, the measures taken in the fall were not able to achieve the level of mobility reduction that was achieved in the spring. The habituation effect could be an attempt to explain why more people are on the road in the second lockdown than in the first. At the beginning of March, uncertainty and fear of the unknown still prevailed, whereas currently a great deal of knowledge is already available with regard to COVID-19.

Finally, two explanations of the analysis:

The analysis is based on anonymized and aggregated mobile data from our partner A1. Thus, tracing back to individual persons, even considering the accuracy, between a few hundred meters in densely populated, urban areas and a few kilometres in rural areas, is impossible. We are looking at patterns of movement and flows of movement – the flow, as it were, rather than individual drops.

In the course of measuring mobility, how many Austrians* stay at home, we look at the radius of movement over one kilometre. If a person does not move over the movement radius for 24 hours, then we assume that the person did not move and stayed at home.

This is our contribution to the current crisis, and we are proud to continue to support decision makers with our data.