The presence of COVID-19 was discovered at the end of 2019, causing a global pandemic starting in early 2020 with the crisis on-going for over a year. The unpredictable nature of the spread of this virus has brought great uncertainty within societies as our knowledge develops about the nature of this virus and its interplay with societal responses (Atchison et al. 2020; Verity et al. 2020). As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many school districts have closed for the remainder of the academic year (Phelps & Sperry, 2020). Suspension of face-to-face instruction in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to concerns about sequences for students’ learning (Engzell, et al., 2021). All over the world, the terms ‘COVID-19’ and ‘LOCKDOWN’ have been thrown about. Figure 1 shows the percentage of searches for both terms on Google between January 2020 and June 2021. The data was extracted using Google Trends and processed in Excel : (number of searches) ÷ (standard value) was used as the relative value, namely, the data with the highest number of searches in the data was set as 100% with the rest having (data) ÷ (data with the highest number of searches) represented and graphed as the percentage. Consequently, the unit of the vertical axis of the graph is the percentage. The correlation coefficient between the two terms is r=0.6, indicating a correlation. In particular, the large spikes around March 2020 almost overlap. ‘LOCKDOWN’ is probably because it was thought to be a reasonable countermeasure that could be taken immediately against a virus of which nothing was known yet.
References
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