Corona vs COVID vs Porn: UK Google searches about Coronavirus Jan 2020 - Jan 2022 by UCOVI

The COVID-19 pandemic was the central feature of news, politics and life in the UK for two years.

The animated bar chart (Tab 1) and suite of timeline charts (tabs 2,3,4) cover - through the most common Google searches in the UK over this time - how popular concerns about it evolved from the novelty and origins of the virus itself, through the restrictions required to combat it and the key figures leading the response, to the vaccine rollout and concern about variants.

Tab 1 - an animated bar chart that takes you through the day-by-day of search terms intensity related to COVID - overlaid by key news events

Tab 2 - shows searches for key concepts and people within a category, such as vaccines, variants or restrictions. See how Matt Hancock's affair compared to Captain TOm's fundraising or Dominic Cummings's eye test.

Tab 3 compares the categories against each other and show's when COVID took over from Coronavirus

Tab 4 shows overall search intensity over time and how the announcement of key events led public interest and concern, as the biggest spikes on the line chart occur when news breaks.

But why is 'porn' in the title? This is the constant search term against which the intensities of all the rest are measured (see tabs 2 and 3) - a useful on to use as it stays the same all year round.

I gave a virtual talk in January 2022 to a community group on building this visualisation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYzCm43awj0