American tech giant Google is using location data collected from smartphones to facilitate public health officials understand how people’s movements have changed in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The company said it plans to publish a series of ‘Community Mobility Reports’ to show the types of places people are visiting across 131 countries and regions, including Rwanda.

The first report was published on Friday, April, 3.

The reports, according to the company’s blog post, intend to spot trends in how people are behaving and responding to social distancing measures.

Broken down by country and then by region, the reports will show if people are headed to markets, restaurants, pharmacies, parks, workplaces and more. It’ll also show how busy these places were before the pandemic.

The findings are "created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the location history setting, which is off by default” in Google’s services, the company said.

Each report contains information about movement patterns in six categories:

Retail and recreation, grocery and pharmacy, parks, transit stations, work places and residences.

For instance, a sample report viewed by The New Times for Rwanda since February 23 to April 5 shows that, the most decongested category is transit station which covers mobility trends for places like public transport hubs lie public buses.

The category has seen a percentage decrease of 75. (-75%). Followed by retail and recreation which has (-60%).

On the other hand, residential places have complied with the stay at home policy as it accounts for (+21).

Additionally, Google highlighted that it would not release information that could be used to identify its users, such as individual location or contacts.

Anyone can view the reports, which cover 131 countries to start. In many locations, users can search for more regional data, examining reports for individual states, provinces, and counties.

After the user selects a geographic region, Google will generate a PDF with the data it has collected. Google said that it chose PDFs over web pages because they could be more easily downloaded and shared with workers in the field.

Data covers the past 48 to 72 hours (two to three days), Google said, and the percentage changes reflect the difference between movement this month and late January.

"In addition to other resources public health officials might have, we hope these reports will help support decisions about how to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.

This information could help officials understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings” Google said in a blog post.

Experts welcomed the new data sharing initiative but said the success will largely depend on the public’ complacency.

Managing Director at Leapr Labs, Serge Tuyihimbaze said the public should turn on their location history setting whenever they leave home in order to obtain their data.

Because, "When your location history setting is turned off, your GPS is disconnected to the satellites so Google cannot recognize your movements.”

Therefore he said, "Our community can facilitate Rwanda’s taskforce by turning on their location history”

Alternatively, Tuyimbaze added, the public can practice Call Detail Record, (CDR), and "A technology that could provide similar results without GPS connectivity”.  

The news comes as much of the world’s population is living under country lockdowns, and other tight restrictions in order to mitigate the possible risks of Covid-19 spread.

For instance, Rwanda on March 21 announced a two week lockdown which has been extended for another two weeks, to enforce social distancing measures.

The country has so far recorded 126 Covid-19 cases, 25 of whom have recovered and also discharged, while no death has been reported.

Globally, coronavirus cases have risen to more than 1,864,620 with a total of 116,052 patients losing their lives in over 185 countries, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.