Posts tagged: rvest

In my last post I wrote about the process for scraping data from Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports. That post dealt with processing just one report, the one for the UK, but Google have published reports for around 130 countries and one for each of the 50 US states. So we could run the script 180 separate times to extract all the data, but we can easily extend our scripting to automate this process.

Last week Google published their COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports. These make use of Google’s very extensive location history data, which they mainly use for telling you about traffic levels on roads, popular times for places in Google Maps and whether a bar or restaurant is busier than usual. In these mobility reports they’ve looked at the location history data for a large number of countries, and localities within countries to help public health officials review the effectiveness of social distancing measures.