Quantifying Covid-19 Pandemic Recovery Through Human Mobility Perspective: An Intra-City Study with the One-Wave Complete Process in Wuhan

COVID-19 pandemic has brought huge obstacles to sustainable cities and communities. Roads to build back from this disaster are attracting global attention. Although some recovery signals are being currently uncovered, detailed intra-city observations, especially with a complete process, are still limited. Herein, we propose a comprehensive framework to quantify the pandemic recovery with long-term and fine-grained mobility data. Taking Wuhan, a typical COVID-19 affected megacity in China, as the study area, we apply our framework to identify accurate recovery phases and depict multi-dimensional recovery characteristics. Our results show that the complete recovery process under the one-wave outbreak exhibits an S-shaped form that is best fitted with the Logistic function. Moreover, recovery characteristics regarding duration, amplitude, and velocity illustrate notable heterogeneities among different blocks. Fortunately, these recovery heterogeneities can be well explained and estimated by city’s inherent features, including population, economic level, and built environment. These findings suggest that human mobility is an efficient perspective for recovery quantification, and the mobility recovery process can be captured via common statistical methods and accessible auxiliary data. Our study provides valuable quantitative support for intra-city resumption tracking, and the Wuhan recovery case can serve as a useful reference to other cities in the post-pandemic.