Effects of mobility restrictions during COVID19 in Italy
Authors/Creators
- 1. 1Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, 52900 Ramat‑Gan, Israel. 2Impact, Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. 3SIT, Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, Schaffhausen, Switzerland. *email: alex.smolyak@gmail.com
Description
To reduce the spread and the effect of the COVID-19 global pandemic, non-pharmaceutical
interventions have been adopted on multiple occasions by governments. In particular lockdown
policies, i.e., generalized mobility restrictions, have been employed to fight the first wave of the
pandemic. We analyze data reflecting mobility levels over time in Italy before, during and after the
national lockdown, in order to assess some direct and indirect effects. By applying methodologies
based on percolation and network science approaches, we find that the typical network
characteristics, while very revealing, do not tell the whole story. In particular, the Italian mobility
network during lockdown has been damaged much more than node- and edge-level metrics indicate.
Additionally, many of the main Provinces of Italy are affected by the lockdown in a surprisingly similar
fashion, despite their geographical and economic dissimilarity. Based on our findings we offer an
approach to estimate unavailable high-resolution economic dimensions, such as real time Provincelevel
GDP, based on easily measurable mobility information.