Human movement decisions during Coronavirus Disease 2019

Abstract: Modelling host behavioral change in response to epidemics is important to describe disease dynamics and many previous studies proposed mathematical models describing it. Indeed, the epidemic of COVID-19 clearly demonstrated that people changed their activity in response to the epidemic, which subsequently modified the disease dynamics. To predict the behavioral change relevant to the disease dynamics, we need to know the epidemic situation (e.g., the number of reported cases) at the moment of decision to change behavior. However, it is difficult to identify the timing of decision-making. In this study, we analyzed travel accommodation reservation data in four prefectures of Japan to observe decision-making timings and how it responded to the changing epidemic situation during Japan's Coronavirus Disease 2019 (eight waves until February 2023). To this end, we defined 'mobility avoidance index' to indicate people's decision of mobility avoidance and quantified it using the time-series of the accommodation booking/cancellation data. Our analysis revealed semi-quantitative rules for day-to-day decision-making of human mobility under a given epidemic situation. We observed matches of the peak dates of the index and the number of reported cases. Additionally, we found that mobility avoidance index increased/decreased linearly with the logarithmic number of reported cases during the first epidemic wave. This pattern agrees with Weber-Fechner law in psychophysics. We also found that the slope of the mobility avoidance index against the change of the logarithmic number of reported cases were similar among the waves, while the intercept of that was much reduced as the first epidemic wave passed by. It suggests that the people's response became weakened after the first experience, as if the number of reported cases were multiplied by a constant small factor.