The association between socioeconomic status and mobility reductions in the early stage of England’s COVID-19 pandemic

This study uses mobile phone data to examine how socioeconomic status was associated with the extent of mobility reduction during the spring 2020 lockdown in England in a manner that considers both potentially confounding effects and spatial dependency and heterogeneity. It shows that socioeconomic status as approximated through income and occupation was strongly correlated with the extent of mobility reduction. It also demonstrates that the specific nature of the association of socioeconomic status with mobility reduction varied markedly across England. The methodological implication is that conventional, spatially naive econometric analysis of the links between an area's socioeconomic status and mobility reduction is inadequate. Spatial regression modelling, and preferably multi-scale geographically weighted regression analysis, should be used instead. Finally, the analysis suggests that the ability to restrict everyday mobility in response to a national lockdown is distributed in a spatially uneven manner, and may need to be considered a luxury or, failing that, a tactic of survival for specific social groups