The Limitations of Digital Lifestyles during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Using daily individual-level mobile app usage data (N = 80,533), and city-level human mobility data and credit card data, we document changes in people’s daily activities and lifestyles during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, lockdown, and recovery in a major city in China. We leverage three de-escalating levels of public health restrictions in regression discontinuity in time analysis to quantify the impact of the pandemic on people’s mobile app usage patterns. We observe dramatic and heterogeneous shifts in behavior as sedentary and non-social apps dominated the lockdown period, while mobility, commerce, social, and informational apps declined in popularity. We also quantify post-pandemic behavioral recovery, which was gradual rather than V-shaped, heterogeneous, and partial: Changes in the population’s behavioral patterns lingered long after local transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 ended in April 2020, and only partially recovered to pre-pandemic patterns by August. Furthermore, we show that the pandemic had unequal impact across gender and age groups. The lockdown disproportionately impeded behaviors that were popular among women and the young. However, the lockdown also reversed gender gaps in app usage, albeit temporarily. Finally, we identify the drivers of the behavioral changes and show that post-pandemic change in app usage is mediated by the degree to which the app category corresponded with physical-world interactions (physical mobility and offline credit card transactions) before the pandemic. Our results show that Internet-enabled lifestyles, far from being immune to the pandemic, are often embedded within physical environments and interactions, and thus only recover after the physical environment recovers.