Pre-lockdown two: We saw a spike in visits to recreation sites in Herefordshire

Pre-lockdown spike in visits

Sky News reported recently that there was a spike in activity in England between news of lockdown 2 hitting the press and lockdown 2 actually starting.

I wondered if the same spike was seen in Herefordshire. Luckily as part of our Covid Recovery Dashboard project we have access to the Google Mobility Data for Herefordshire.

The headline is, yes, we saw a spike in Herefordians visiting Retail and Recreation sites in the county immediately before lockdown 2 in-line with behaviour seen in other parts of England.

Google Mobility Data tracks how much people visit different types of places in Herefordshire. It uses smartphone records from participating individuals. What we see is a comparison of how much people visited different places compared to a baseline just before lockdown 1. So 10% shows that there were 10% more visits than the baseline, -10% shows there were 10% fewer visits than the baseline.

Retail and Recreation

Google shows a daily figure for “Retail and Recreation” sites. This doesn’t include parks or supermarkets (which have their own figures). This includes non-grocery shops, pubs, restaurants etc.

The data

For most of October visits to Retail and Recreation sites were fairly steady varying between 30% and 15% fewer visits than the baseline.

Lockdown 2 was officially announced on 31 October.

We see a sharp spike on 2nd, 3rd and 4th November peaking at 4% higher than the baseline. Then there is a sharp drop on the first day of lockdown 2 (55% fewer visits than the baseline).

Data for Herefordshire

At a national level this sort of information is, presumably, useful to the government in planning how it will share public health messages.

At a local level we think this sort of data will be useful to anyone who is interested in how the economy of the county is being affected by Covid.

We update the Google Mobility dataset every day,