A survey carried out in the United Kingdom in September 2021 revealed that the main source used for news on COVID-19 among consumers aged 16 to 24 years old was the BBC, with 51 percent saying that they went to a BBC platform for coronavirus updates in the last week. The same share of respondents in that age group also used social media for COVID-19 information, whereas older consumers were more likely to read newspapers.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

There is an urgent need to understand the factors that mediate and mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on behaviour and wellbeing. However, the onset of the outbreak was unexpected and the rate of acceleration so rapid as to preclude the planning of studies that can address these critical issues. Coincidentally, in January 2020, just prior to the outbreak in the UK, my team launched a study that collected detailed (~50 minute) cognitive and questionnaire assessments from >200,000 members of the UK public as part of a collaboration with the BBC. This placed us in a unique position to examine how aspects of mental health subsequently changed as the pandemic arrived in the UK. Therefore, we collected data from a further ~120,000 people in May, including additional detailed measures of self-perceived pandemic impact and free text descriptions of the main positives, negatives and pragmatic measures that people found helped them maintain their wellbeing.

In this data archive, we include the survey data from January and May 2020 examining impact of Covid-19 on mood, wellbeing and behaviour in the UK population. This data is reported in a preprint article, where we apply a novel fusion of psychometric, multivariate and machine learning analyses to this unique dataset, in order to address some of the most pressing questions regarding wellbeing during the pandemic in a data-driven manner. The preprint is available on this URL. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.18.20134635v1

In 2020, the most trending world news topic, according to the average amount of keyword mentions was news about the coronavirus pandemic. On the BBC and CNN websites "world news" section, coronavirus-related news had an average of 70 thousand average keyword mentions. Additionally, the U.S. elections generated an average of 42 thousand average keyword mentions.