The data revealed by Google's COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports is perhaps unsurprising - throughout the recent lockdown people in central Victorian local government areas predominately decreased their movements in public spaces and increased their mobility at home.

But there are some interesting takes out of this data. Why did Mount Alexander and Hepburn shires increase mobility to retail and recreation settings when everywhere else decreased? Why did Greater Bendigo's public transport movements decrease further than Victoria's average? And why is the levels of mobility in residential settings roughly the same across the state?

La Trobe University Bendigo campus director Dr Julie Rudner explores interactions between policy, place and people.

The data encapsulated in COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports comes from location tracking through applications on mobile devices. In other words, there are machines on the other end of the phone in your hot little hands who work out where you are all the time.

While this can be scary, the machines "chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential," the Google report states.

The baseline day is the median value from a five-week period pre-pandemic from January 3 to February 6, 2020, and the comparing data is from June 13 to July 25, 2021, during which time Victoria entered its fifth lockdown.

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Dr Rudner said it was interesting the data revealed how good people were at following the chief health officer's coronavirus lockdown rules.

"Looking at Greater Bendigo, there's no surprise that public transport is down," she said. "I think it will stay down for a long time as public transport tends to have lots of people and is hard to control.

"I think a lot of the public transport decrease has come from people working from home. I used to take the train every day to Bendigo and Bundoora from Castlemaine, and now it's almost completely empty but people are also choosing to drive for own safety.

"Things have gone back up a certain amount to what they were in previous lockdowns but nowhere near to what they were prior to lockdown."

Dr Rudner said the dip in workplace and rise in residential movements could correlate the working-from-home lockdown orders as people had set up their home offices.

Victoria's fifth lockdown also fell during the state's school holidays, which could also indicate the difference between the greater drop in workplace compared with a steady rise in residential movements.

Compared to the other sets of data, the decrease in supermarket mobility doesn't see as great of a drop from the baseline data. Dr Rudner said this could be due to people changing their habits to one-weekly shop or the rising popularity of click-and-collect service.

"One thing that's interesting is we can see a little drop in retail mobility right before the state went into lockdown," she said.

"This could be because Victorians were watching what was happening in NSW, see that it wasn't controlled and were bracing for a lockdown.

"Another interesting positive is we know people weren't going to Bendigo for shopping from other areas if they didn't need too.

"This could be proportional to workplaces shifting to the home - if people were travelling to work in Bendigo, they would be more inclined to do their shopping there where it's cheaper.

"I don't know how closely shopping and workplaces correlate but there could be people who used to travel for work who aren't anymore so they're looking locally for shopping."

There was no data from Google about Mount Alexander and Hepburn shire's supermarket and pharmacies movement - only a sharp rise in retail and recreation mobility, which contrasted the state's average.

The data also doesn't reveal whether the mobility was linked to school holiday tourism.

While it's too early to determine how COVID-19 will affect the world as we know it for years to come, Dr Rudner said looking at people's mobility patterns was a good place to start.

"There's a lot of ideas out there at the moment," she said.

"Some say the coronavirus pandemic will only be a blip in time and interest in moving to regional areas will only be temporary.

"Places such as Bendigo are desirable as they're closer to the city and on a good public transport line."

The booming rental market in central Victoria continues according to the Real Estate Institute of Victoria who reported Bendigo and Loddon's vacancy rate was one per cent in June, as compared to regional Victoria which was 1.2 per cent during the same period.

"In my research, people's habits are levelled by their notions of risk," she said. "We're seeing that play out with vaccines. In the United Kingdom and the United States, the chance of getting a blood clot is far lower than getting COVID.

"I think our behaviours have to do with risk profiles as well as socio-economic positions; are you going to buy all these hygiene products when it's a decision between that and food?

"All of those things come into what determines our behaviours and trends, how we understand this information, respond and move forward with actions and mobility."

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