HUMAN MOBILITY DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN WESTERN BALKAN COUNTRIES

Abstract

At the end of 2019, a new coronavirus appeared in the Chinese province of Wuhan, causing the appearance of the disease COVID-19. The disease spread very quickly to other countries in the world, including the Balkans. The governments of many countries have decided to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the community through social distancing measures. Decisions to ban the movement of people were easy to make, but they were very difficult to implement and enforce in practice. Some of the countries monitored their citizens through various applications installed on smartphones. This led to criticism by many NGOs, as they felt that this violated basic human rights of freedom of movement and privacy. Some lawsuits were even filed in the courts because the citizens felt that they were denied rights guaranteed by the respective constitution. Google uses the ability to monitor all those citizens around the world on a daily basis who use smartphones or handheld devices, which provide the option to record the "location history" of the users. This is possible for them, since most people have voluntarily agreed to this option on their devices. In early 2020, Google began publishing global mobility data on a daily basis through a report called “Community Mobility Reports”. The report shows the percentage change in human activity at six grouped locations. Data obtained in the reference days before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic are used as a basis for comparison. In this paper, we studied the dynamics of human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in 7 countries of the Balkans: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania. For Montenegro and Albania Google did not provide data on human mobility. We present the processed data graphically. For all examined countries, we statistically analyzed the obtained data and presented them in a table.