Normalizing COVID (with help from cats & dogs)
It’s been a fascinating week in the social-distancing world.
As we highlighted last week, the majority of the posts about COVID-19 focus on positive behaviours and community support. That trend continues this week, but the overall volume of conversation has flattened out quickly, suggesting that people have adjusted to the new, hopefully temporary, normal.
This made us very curious. We compared the conversation to how COVID-19 was spreading. In the face of the ever-increasing number of deaths every day, the volume of conversation has remained stable and consistently more positive than negative.
The explosion of posts appears to have happened when the first deaths occurred in North America, the borders were closed and emergency health measures were introduced. Since then, we appear to have normalized our world.
But we owe it to our fur-children. They have risen to the occasion, although cats stepped up much earlier – adding fuel to the eternal dog-lover versus cat-lover debate.
Click here to access our COVID-19 social listening dashboard. Login information is below.
email: public@stormylakeconsulting.com
password: bathtub
We also wanted to pass on a quick thought about grief. While we all put on a brave face to convince our friends, families, colleagues and ourselves that we are fine, grief can be lurking beneath the surface. Specifically, Anticipatory Grief. This is the grief that arises when we can sense something bad is coming but we can’t see it. Three things help: understanding this is what we are feeling, letting go of what we can’t control and stocking up on compassion. There is a great, short article in the Harvard Business Review about this.