For the most part, it’s par for the course. All metrics saw another decrease this week. The online Covid-19 discussion shrank by another 9%, about the average we’ve seen over the last couple of months. Again this shows less and less people are talking about Covid-19.

The number of Covid-19 articles published fell as well, this week by 14%, one of the largest drops we’ve seen for this metric. In real terms, that’s a drop of 96k articles – a significant shift.

We can see an even bigger drop in the total engagement these pieces got. This metric fell by 40%, the largest fall we’ve seen so far. This can’t be explained away by saying there are fewer articles.The fall in engagements is by a far larger percentage, and the average number of engagements per article is 339, down from 483.

So what’s going on?

We can take a closer look at this drop by comparing the last four weeks of data against each other, by day.

Last week sits way below the previous three, showing a far bigger week-on-week drop. It also shows straight day-to-day decreases, unlike the other three weeks. The difference is particularly stark at the weekend, where engagements were down 61% from the previous week.

The day-to-day pattern, and big weekend drop, may give us the reason. On May 25, George Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis and this quickly became a huge story. The country has since been rocked by six days of huge protests across the nation.

As the world’s attention increasingly turned to events in the US day-by-day engagements with Covid-19 articles fell. As protests raged over the weekend, Covid-19 article engagements saw their biggest falls.

Moving in, moving out: Home buying conversation rises during lockdown

Lockdown interrupted everything, including the housing market. Viewings were cancelled, moves were postponed, and, just like the economy, the housing market plummeted.

But in last week’s bulletin, as part of our recent report on whether Covid-19 has changed consumer behavior in the long term, our Qriously survey found that 63% of people who had planned to buy a house (pre-outbreak) in 2020 still plan to do so.

This piqued our interest and we wanted to know why consumers were so optimistic about their house buying plans. Using our Consumer Research platform we looked at mentions of home purchases from March to May, and discovered that people are still discussing buying homes on social media despite the crisis and bleak forecasts.

In fact, mentions of buying a house have been up so far in 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.

We found mentions of buying a home were driven by falling house prices and relocation. With more companies taking on remote working policies, employees are beginning to think about living wherever they like.

From March to May, family was a big driver of conversation with 165k people pondering moving closer to home permanently due to coronavirus uncertainty. Meanwhile, 127k mentions were focused on moving for jobs, while 105k mentions referenced wanting a bit more space.

We also found much of the conversation about buying a home was driven by avoiding any future coronavirus outbreaks. For example, there were 23k mentions asking for advice and opinions on moving out of New York, specifically to avoid any future flare-ups in the densely populated city.

As we’ve learned throughout these bulletins, consumers are making decisions big and small in reaction to the pandemic. Changing up our living spaces is definitely going to be a part of this going forward.

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Thanks for reading

That’s it for today, we’ll see you tomorrow. Want to sign up for these bulletins? Head here.

Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team