Fig. 1: The uses of mobile phone data to inform COVID-19 public health response and their possible biases.

a Over the course of the epidemic, mobile phone data and applications may be relevant to help answer a number of important epidemiological questions needed to guide the implementation and evaluation of various interventions. b However, these data should be considered in light of ownership and use biases that may or may not limit generalizability to the overall population. Mobile phone owners and users only represent a subset of the population and may have additional age (shown here for a synthetic population for illustrative purposes), socio-demographic, or geographic biases. Applications that require the use of a smartphone or application may further limit the generalizability of these data since they represent smaller subsets of the user population.