Throughout the pandemic, the number of people saying they had no optimism at all has remained low. That said, this number reached its highest level in our last two surveys, with 17% of people putting themselves in this camp.

While this is a sign of a shift change, the vast majority of people feel at least somewhat optimistic and our latest survey showed that 18% of respondents feel very optimistic. Clearly it takes a lot more than a pandemic to knock the hope out of people.

Before we think about why less people have optimism than a few weeks ago, let’s take a closer look at the current picture by breaking down the data by country and age.

It’s a fairly uniform picture across the countries we surveyed. Australia shows the most optimism at 86%, Spain has the lowest amount at 79%. All countries fall within seven points of each other.

It’s hard to say the reason for this relative uniformity when the situations in each of the countries differ so much. What it could show is that as we adjust more to Covid-19, our expectations for the future have become more aligned. That’s not to say that any future regional developments could change this.

Now to look at age differences.

We actually see less variation amongst age groups than we did between countries, with optimism levels falling between 80% and 86%. But we can see some signs of a trend. It looks like the young and the old are less optimistic than the middle-aged.

This makes sense. For the older population, health concerns are obviously severe. Meanwhile, the younger respondents are seeing their education, income, and job prospects put on hold. For the middle aged, who are more likely to have savings and own a home than those in the more youthful groups, things may not look so dire.

Going back to the falling optimism amongst the whole group, there are a few factors that may be at play. As we saw optimism levels fall, concerns about health and economical issues rose.

For example, people are now the most concerned they’ve been about their own health since the beginning of May. In fact, all three concerns we asked about are reversing the steady downwards trends they’ve shown since we started our surveys.

While we may be getting used to being in a pandemic, our concerns and worries will still change as the situation does around us. Second waves and local outbreaks, along with countries facing the winter flu season, mean people’s optimism has got a lot to battle before this is all over.

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team