March 2020: ‘Coughing’
- By 6 March 2020 – before anyone had even heard about 'tiers' or 'bubbles' – there had already been 5.5 million views of discussions on Mumsnet about the virus.
- Uses of the word ‘coronavirus’ skyrocketed from 4,008 in February to 12,161 in March.
- Our new Coronavirus forum was created on 12 March. It racked up around 400,000 views a day and nearly four million views in total during March alone.
- The announcement of lockdown prompted what would turn out to be only the fourth-biggest spike on our Swearometer over the following twelve months.
- Mentions of 'coughs' and ‘coughing’ shot up, from 1,599 in February to 11,144 in March.
April 2020: ‘Joe Wicks’‘
- 'COVID’ is used 17,773 times.
- Parents start to fret about ‘home schooling’, which is mentioned 2,419 times in April (compared with 243 in February and 1,540 in March).
- We see a noticeable dip in site traffic during the Thursday evening Claps for Carers.
- New words appearing include ‘Zoom’, used 2,662 times in April compared with 60 times in February 2020.
- Joe Wicks is mentioned 566 times, compared with 25 in February.
Mumsnet site traffic data for a Thursday evening in early April 2020
May to August 2020: ‘Barnard Castle’
- Dominic Cummings impacts Mumsnet data for probably the first time, as mentions of ‘Barnard Castle’ increase around 30,000% compared to February (608 vs 2).
- Between May and August there are 4,316,630 views of our Coronavirus board.
- July is the biggest spike for mentions of ‘mask', with 19,488 uses compared with 1,616 in February.
- ‘Quarantine’ sees a spike in August, with 2,870 mentions.
September to December 2020: ‘Scotch egg’
- On 31 October the second lockdown is announced and by 6 November traffic to the Coronavirus forum doubles, from 900k to 1.8m page visits.
- There's a 300% uptick in the use of the term ‘Scotch egg’.
- On 22 December Boris Johnson announces that Christmas is effectively cancelled, resulting in the second-biggest spike of the twelve months on our Swearometer.
- There’s noticeable increase in the use of words associated with poor mental health over the twelve-month period. For example, the words ‘anxiety’ or ‘anxious’ appear 104,992 times in 2020, a 32% increase over 2019, while ‘worry’ and other derivatives appeared 292,956 times, a 37% increase.
January to March 2021: ‘Vaccine’
- January saw the biggest spike in mentions of ‘vaccine’, at 18,427.
- Across January, February and early March, we host 22,944 threads about the vaccine.
- Conversations about schools heat up, and we see the biggest spike on our Swearometer at 8pm on 4 January when Boris Johnson announces that most children will not be returning to school after all.
- Mentions of 'Google Classroom' increase, from just two in February 2020 to 516 in January 2021.
- By the second week of March 2021, our Coronavirus topic hosts 58,300 discussion threads.
- In one week in March 2021 alone, there are 33,148 views of discussions containing the word ‘Coronavirus’.