"Alert level 4 restrictions mean people need to stay at home, schools and universities will be closed, as well as non-essential businesses, major reprioritisation of health services, and air travel and public transport will only be for essential services."

— NZ Herald, March 2020

The Problem

The Covid-19 pandemic created a constantly changing environment where decision makers needed timely and accurate evidence to ensure essential support services were delivered to New Zealanders.

This fundamentally challenged many of the existing data products and data-sharing methods. The Data Ventures team quickly recognised the importance of creating dynamic and pragmatic solutions to address these data gaps.

The solution

Data Ventures quickly set about engaging with different government departments and affected industries to understand where there were informational gaps. Data Ventures identified an urgent desire from MBIE, DPMC and Ministry of Health for timely data pertaining to population movements to assist with the Government’s response.

Using aggregated and anonymised mobile phone location data, Data Ventures swiftly created a tool estimating population mobility in near real-time by suburb for the whole of New Zealand — called Population Density. This is the first tool of its kind in the world and provided an unprecedented level of insight into New Zealand’s pandemic movements. This tool, and associated insights, were subsequently used to assist the Government across a wide number of important and time-sensitive use cases, as well as being shared publicly to inform the general public.

Our mobility measure is based on estimates of how many people are moving in and out of areas around New Zealand. The mobility index represents a percentage difference from normal mobility. For example, an index value of -50 means people are moving around 50% less than usual. L3 in Auckland started on 28 April in 2020 and 22 September in 2021.

In addition to this useful product, Data Ventures also recognised that unprecedented government collaboration would be required. Data Ventures immediately set out to enable near real-time data sharing between public and private sector organisations. With careful consideration of the legal, privacy and security implications, Data Ventures quickly created a unique cloud computing solution empowering the safe sharing of a wide range of data.

This was crucial to ensure the provision of essential and sensitive data on people movements, economic activity, and health outcomes such as border entries, banking transactions, clinical records, hospital capacity and testing capacity, into the hands of key decision makers. The access to this data created a common set of evidence around which the government could create a unified response.