Press release No. 009 of 7 January 2022
- Mobility slightly above pre-crisis level on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve but lower at the Christmas holidays and on the days until New Year’s Eve
- People travelled longer distances again at Christmas 2021 than 2020
- Low pedestrian frequency in inner cities in the weeks before Christmas
WIESBADEN – Despite high infection rates and warnings about the spread of the Omicron variant of Covid-19, people in Germany travelled somewhat more on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve 2021 than 2019, the year before Covid. Mobility was markedly higher than in 2020 on both days. This is shown by an ad-hoc evaluation of experimental data carried out by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) to represent mobility changes during the Covid-19 pandemic. In all of Germany, the mobility was 2% higher on 24 December 2021 than on Christmas Eve 2019. On 24 December 2020, in contrast, the mobility had been 14% lower than on Christmas Eve 2019. On New Year’s Eve 2021, the mobility was 6% above pre-crisis level whereas it had been 16% below 2019 on New Year’s Eve 2020. In all of December and on the Christmas holidays of 2021, however, the total mobility of the population was lower than in the pre-pandemic Christmas time of 2019.
