What does the world Google during Corona? 13 graphs 📈

The year of 2020 will be remembered as the ‘year of corona’. The first few cases from China made many shrug.

A few weeks later we all panicked.

Over 7 billion of us were confronted with something we’ve never seen before. A new disease, which had the potential to impact all of us.

Knowing so little about a dangerous virus made us think about:

  • How to stay safe
  • How to stay healthy
  • And much more…

In this article you’ll find 13 graphs with a red line and a yellow line 📊

  1. On the left side you’ll see the absolute number of daily new corona infections worldwide, which matches the red line.
  2. On the right side, you’ll see the relative search volume for the given keyword, which matches the yellow line. This line represents a relative growth/decline.

Expand to see more information on how this data was gathered

1) The daily number of infections

  • This data was collected from Google’s ‘daily new infections’ chart. 
  • This data represents the number of new people infected with corona on a specific date.

 

2) The search volume of any search query 

  • This data was taken from Google Trends. 
  • Since the absolute search volumes aren’t interesting for this study, relative numbers were taken. 
  • Hereby you can consider 0 to be the moment of the year were the least people are searching for this keyword
  • 100 represents the day where the most people are searching for this keyword.

#1 Working from home? Is that even possible?

Yellow = people searching for “tips for working from home”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • When corona started most businesses decided to have their employees work from home.
  • Clearly many of us didn’t know how to deal with this and asked Google for help.
  • Apparently we figured it out pretty fast.

#2 And if necessary – how do I survive in the wild?

Yellow = people searching for “survival tips”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • When the number of corona infections started to grow, we got interested in surviving in the wild.

#3 We have trouble sleeping at night

Yellow = people searching for “sleeping tips”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • When the number of daily infections started to grow, there are 2 big spikes for people searching for “sleeping tips”.
  • Althought this can’t be said for sure but it seems like we’re worrying about corona at night.

#4 The first corona wave made us depressed

Yellow = people searching for “suicide tips”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • When the number of daily infections started to grow, the number of people searching for “suicide tips” went through the roof.

#5 Is the world ending?

Yellow = people searching for “world end”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • The first few cases of corona caused an epic increase in the search phrase “world end”.

#6 Let’s stay at home and order food

Yellow = people searching for “order food”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • When the number of daily infections started to grow, we realized we don’t need to go outside. We can have food come to us.

#7 Let’s clean our hands (for a while)

Yellow = people searching for “hand sanitizer”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • The first few weeks of corona made us interested in hand sanitizer.
  • After a few weeks our interest in hand sanitizer dropped significantly.

#8 How do we entertain ourselves?

Yellow = people searching for “online activities”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • After the first few corona cases we immediately jumped to online activities.
  • When the summer hit we got less interested in online activities.

#9 Should I wear a facemask?

Yellow = people searching for “facemask”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • At the start of the corona virus we got extremely interested in facemasks. 
  • Our interest in facemasks dropped quite fast, but came back during the summer.

#10 How do I avoid corona?

Yellow = people searching for “health tips”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • The first few weeks of corona we were extremely interested in health tips.
  • Our interest in health tips faded away pretty fast, and is currently even lower than in january 2020.

#11 What is corona?

Yellow = people searching for “corona”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • This graph shows a peak of interest right at the start. This makes sense, since none of us heard about this disease.
  • Once we learned about it, we stopped saerching for it. Even when the number of daily infects increased.

#12 The party is (obviously) over

Yellow = people searching for “night club”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • During the first few weeks of corona most night clubs around the world got shut down.
Vaccine

#13 Is there a vaccine yet?

Yellow = people searching for “vaccine”
Red = daily new corona infections

What’s interesting

  • During the beginning of this pandemic, we Googled for a potential vaccine. Only to find out there wasn’t one.
  • The past few weeks our interested in a vaccine is skyrocketing.

How was this data collected?

1) The daily number of infections

  • This data was collected from Google’s ‘daily new infections’ chart. 
  • This data represents the number of new people infected with corona on a specific date.

2) The search volume of any search query

  • This data was taken from Google Trends. 
  • Since the absolute search volumes aren’t interesting for this study, relative numbers were taken. 
  • Hereby you can consider 0 to be the moment of the year were the least people are searching for this keyword
  • 100 represents the day where the most people are searching for this keyword.

Did you find this interesting?