Brandwatch Bulletin: Peak Pandemic Aches and Pains

Posture check.

Welcome to the end of the week, and the first February weekend. January already feels so long ago.

Today we’ve dug up data on the health issues we’re reporting online. And things aren’t looking great.

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What’s causing us pain?

From lack of exercise to shoddy home office setups, the pandemic has caused health problems beyond those the virus itself causes.

We used Brandwatch Consumer Research to see what common health issues people reported the most since March last year. Here’s what we found out.

Headaches are by far the most common ailment. This is to be expected since headaches have so many causes, like staring at screens, hangovers, and stress. Backache, something surely influenced by bad working-from-home posture, takes second place.

This ranking is mostly unchanged from the pre-pandemic times, with headaches always topping the list by a wide margin.

But what has changed is the volume of complaints.

Across 2019, reports of health issues online remained pretty steady. We saw a jump in January 2020 but, after looking at data going back to 2017, this turned out to be seasonal.

The huge jump starting in March 2020 was not. All of the health issues we tracked saw a significant increase just after the pandemic was declared, with reports continuing to rise throughout the year and peaking in January 2021.

That’s not a good sign for our health. It tells us that even though there’s been plenty of time to adjust to life in a pandemic, clearly whatever we may have tried to do to alleviate these health issues just isn’t working.

On top of that, some issues have had much bigger increases than others during the pandemic.

Wrist pain was up by 96% last month compared to January 2019, a gigantic increase. This could be linked to poor WFH setups, and back pain’s big rise could be too. Eye strain saw the third biggest increase, a possible sign that we’re spending far too much time staring at screens while stuck indoors.

Again compared to January 2019, headaches were up 56% compared, with 217k reports. Finally, while knee pain is up, it’s seen the lowest increases. We can’t be sure, but this may be due to people not moving around so much and therefore lowering the chance of injury. Of course, a lack of movement has its own negative health effects.

Overall, it’s not a pretty picture, especially if the rising trend continues. Businesses that went remote due to the pandemic: Have you made sure your employees have what they need to create a healthy setup at home?

If not, it might be time to get on that.

Thanks for reading

That’s us for today. We’ll be back Monday, so if you’re not signed up for our bulletins already, head here.

Stay safe,

Brandwatch React Team

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