“The COVID-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented natural experiment providing insights into the emergence of collective behavioral changes. … Here, we characterize collective physical distancing … in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the pre-vaccine era by analyzing de-identified, privacy-preserving location data for a panel of over 5.5 million anonymized, opted-in U.S. devices. We define five indicators of users’ mobility and proximity to investigate how the emerging collective behavior deviates from typical pre-pandemic patterns during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Find the paper and full list of authors at PLOS Digital Health.