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The rapid spread of SARSCoV2 and its threat to health systems worldwide have led governments to take acute actions to enforce social distancing. Previous studies used complex epidemiological models to quantify the effect of lockdown policies on infection rates. However, these rely on prior assumptions or on official regulations. Here, we use countryspecific reports of daily mobility from people cellular usage to model social distancing. Our datadriven model enabled the extraction of lockdown characteristics which were crossed with observed mortality rates to show that: (i) the time at which social distancing was initiated is highly correlated with the number of deaths, r² = 0.64, while the lockdown strictness or its duration is not as informative; (ii) a delay of 7.49 days in initiating social distancing would double the number of deaths; and (iii) the immediate response has a prolonged effect on COVID19 death toll.