How confinement measures have affected mobility in the Balearic Islands

April 14, 2020

The Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC, UIB-CSIC), coordinated by researcher Dr. José Ramasco, has prepared a series of reports analyzing the changes in mobility in the Balearic Islands due to exceptional containment measures against the expansion of the COVID-19.

These reports use aggregate mobility data (i.e. taking into account a full working day) provided by Kido Dynamics based on mobile phone records from the company Orange, accounting for approximately 25% of the state market. Mobility is analysed in two categories: within each municipality and between municipalities.

The second and third of these reports, presented on a weekly basis, compare four different Wednesdays: Wednesday 4 March (before the declaration of the State of Alarm), Wednesday 18 March (after the declaration of the State of Alarm and with the first package of restrictions, limiting movements to justified causes) and Wednesday 1 and 8 April (after the adoption of the second package of measures closing all non-essential activity). To analyse how mobility has changed, the relative difference between the days chosen is calculated. The first report presented by IFISC (CSIC-UIB) carries out the same analysis for 4, 6, 18 and 20 March, all before the adoption of the second package of measures (29 March).

Analysing mobility between municipalities, a sharp fall (50% on average) is observed in this type of journeys for March 18 with respect to March 4. This fall intensified on 1 April, with the second package of measures adopted (reaching 70-80%). These results show a strong decrease in journeys between municipalities in the Balearic Islands. Given the source of the data, the journeys here refer to journeys by any means of transport, including walking, and the different sections between stops are counted independently.

The case of mobility within each municipality is more complex. On the one hand, it can be seen that the approval of the first package of measures reduced mobility by an average of 20%, reaching 40-50% when the second set of restrictions was adopted. However, it is observed that in some municipalities of the interior of Majorca there has been an increase in mobility within the municipality. This increase, already observed after the first measures, can reach increases of 50%. This is due to the fact that the population of these municipalities used to travel outside for work and now they stay most of the day inside the municipality, so that the necessary trips for supply and agricultural work are clearly counted there, observing high relative increases, although not in net values. A similar effect has been found in rural areas of the Peninsula.

The following figure shows the relative differences in mobility between municipalities (left column) and within each municipality (right column) between Wednesday 4 March and Wednesday 18 March (bottom row) and Wednesday 8 April (top row). It can be clearly observed how in the mobility between municipalities there has been a strong generalised fall while the mobility within each municipality presents an increase in the interior area of Mallorca.


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Finally, the trips between municipalities on the different islands are analysed to check whether the changes have been homogeneous. In particular, it can be seen how trips to and from Palma have fallen from 60% (March 18) to 70-75% (April 1 and 8). In the case of Ibiza and Menorca the drop has been from 50% to 75%.

All reports, with details for each municipality, along with others made at the provincial level for all of Spain, are available on the website of Data Analytics @ IFISC, the service unit created by IFISC with the aim of providing data mining services and analysis and modeling of big data to the CSIC, the UIB and external entities.



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