Presence and mobility of the population during Covid-19 outbreak and lockdown in Italy

The non-medical policies implemented to “flatten the curve” and to reduce the stress on the health system during the COVID-19 outbreak represents a critical event in the history of Italy. This kind of “lockdown” has left people stranded in their homes and, for some, out of their homes unable to return to their region of residence due to the disruptions in the mobility network. As a consequence, a vast scale of research is being performed to understand the patterns of mobility of people during the emergency. The availability of rich datasets has made it possible to quantify the dynamics of spatial distribution of people as a response to the strict measures. With the help of the data provided by the Facebook – Data for Good program, an effort is made to describe and to reason on the presence and of mobility patterns of the population at a regional and provincial scale during the lockdown. Our interpretation is that, initially, tourists left the country and later Italians abroad managed to return from abroad stabilising the population. Concerning internal mobility, it is evident that the earliest affected Regions see a higher number of stationary users in the initial days of the outbreak. On the other hand, the central and the southern regions does not display a positive relative change of staying home until the official lockdown is announced on the 9th of March, 2020. Before the stricter lockdown started there was not a significant exodus of people from the North to the rest of the country. To the contrary, a visible relocation of people occurred between the cities and their urban belts.