My basic question: is there data that can track the mnovements of essential workers vs those on lockdown during the early pandemic period?

Questions & Help
1

Hello Ross told me to post a question here. I’m looking for data that tracks movement of people during 3/20 to 5/20. My basic question: is there data that can track the mnovements of essential workers vs those on lockdown during the early pandemic period?

2

There’s no information in the SafeGraph data about personal characteristics of the people who own the devices, so no way to separate out essential workers. That said, two things you can do:

  1. You do know the home location of the device, and could use information about the proportion of essential workers in each CBG to get a rough idea of essential worker vs other travel
  2. There is an experimental variable in the Neighborhood Patterns data (Neighborhood Patterns | SafeGraph Docs ) that makes an aggregate count of “work behavior” - people leaving in the morning, staying in the same place a long time, and coming back. You can take this as a rough measure of travel done for the purposes of work, although who knows if they’re really essential workers, and of course you can’t track a given visitor to other locations.
3

This is very helpful thank you! I’m looking into different CBGs now.