COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports –

See how your community is moving around differently due to COVID-19

As global communities respond to COVID-19, we’ve heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19.

These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

Read more, here is the one for New York dated 3/29/2020.

I usually look at the Google search results for a biz and see when it’s not busy before going, unclear if this applies now, or works now, here’s how it works according to Google “Popular times only appears on popular business pages. The way it works it or rather the data is collected is by people visiting a store, that have opted in to storing location data on their mobile phone.”

A good feature Google could add is to allow people to indicate if there are specific hours set aside for elderly and higher risk folks to use the store specifically.