The drastic drop in mobility as Covid-19 spread around the world hit its extreme at the start of April. People were moving around 63% less than they were on January 13, a result of lockdowns and personal caution.

Eerily quiet streets, empty buses, and cars sat untouched in driveways across the globe. It was a bizarre time for us all, but it wasn’t long before we started to get back on the move.

Global mobility steadily increased from mid-April, eventually overtaking the data’s baseline level as we went into July. With lockdown measures eased in many places, growing confidence amongst the populace, and warmer weather in the northern hemisphere, mobility continued to increase.

It’s worth stopping to note here that while levels were increasing, they were likely far below what you would expect around this time in a normal year.

Seasonal trends will have contributed to the fall as we went past August. But as the year went on lockdown measures were tightened in various countries as outbreaks and second waves reared their heads.

Eventually we reach January 2021 where we can directly compare data to last year’s. Mobility is still down by nearly a fifth. While vaccination efforts are ongoing, global new Covid-19 case levels are at some of the highest we’ve ever seen.

In other words, we’re still far from “normal” mobility levels.

The picture isn’t identical everywhere, though. Here’s how the data looks for five major cities around the world.

We can see that all the cities share a similar overall shape with the global data, but it’s clear there’s a lot of variation at different points.

Take Singapore, for example. Mobility levels dropped off far earlier compared to other cities. We can’t be sure on the exact reasons but Covid-19 was taken very seriously early on, with restrictions and checks around travel to Wuhan and China implemented in January.

Tokyo is also particularly interesting. Firstly because of its big jump in mobility in late March, while numbers had fallen through the floor elsewhere. Why the boost in mobility? Again, there are too many factors at play for us to be completely sure, but the jump coincided with the city’s cherry blossom season.

Tokyo also saw far higher mobility from August through December than the other cities we analyzed. As with the global data, these levels are likely lower than normal, but they may reflect Japan’s success in fighting Covid-19. The country saw far less cases per capita in this period than the US, UK, Brazil, and Singapore.

As we move into January 2021, all cities are below where they were at the same time last year. This is particularly true with London. The city has been under restrictions for a long time (it’s now under a third national lockdown), and mobility levels are down 55% compared to this time last year.

There’s a long way to go before the world gets fully back on the move.