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AbstractCOVID-19 caused widespread disruption to normal lives and human activities. In China, the mobility behaviour response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the intra-city and population group levels is largely unknown, mainly due to a lack of individual-level publicly available mobility data. Using 210 million geotagged posts from 10 million social media users, the study quantified the changes in stay-at-home and outings across amenities and groups in China during the pandemic. The users were compared to national census data to examine their representativeness. To validate the results externally, the geotagged data was performed post-stratified correction and further comparison with commonly used data sources. The findings reveal that (i) there was between 16.8% and 57.7% decrease in visits to places of work, retail and recreation sites, parks, transit stations, grocery stores, and pharmacies within one month of the outbreak; (ii) those who are young, have a bachelor's degree or higher, and are unmarried experienced a greater decline in outings; (iii) people preferred to visit nearby locations, resulting in a 4.3% increase in visits to retail and recreational sites within a 3-kilometer radius of their homes. The data and findings could gain insight into the asymmetric impact of the pandemic on public infrastructure use and socio-demographic groups, helping design targeted policies to promote outdoor activities, stimulate economic recovery, and alleviate social inequality in vulnerable groups.

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, governments find themselves facing a new challenge: motivating citizens to resume economic activity. What is an effective way to do so? We investigate this question using a field experiment in the city of Zhengzhou, China, immediately following the end of the city's COVID-19 lockdown. We assessed the effect of a descriptive norms intervention providing information about the proportion of participants' neighbors who have resumed economic activity. We find that informing individuals about their neighbors' plans to visit restaurants increases the fraction of participants visiting restaurants by 12 percentage points (37%), among those participants who underestimated the proportion of neighbors who resumed economic activity. Those who overestimated did not respond by reducing restaurant attendance (the intervention yielded no "boomerang" effect); thus, our descriptive norms intervention yielded a net positive effect. We explore the moderating role of risk preferences and the effect of the intervention on subjects' perceived risk of going to restaurants, as well as the contrast with an intervention for parks, which were already perceived as safe. All of these analyses suggest our intervention worked by reducing the perceived risk of going to restaurants.