Coronavirus: What are the concerns of the nation?

The coronavirus pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on all of our lives. We’re seeing this first-hand at Citizens Advice — last week our website had 2.2 million views, the busiest week yet in our history.

We saw 141,000 views alone to our advice page on what coronavirus means for people — a 1341% change from the week previously — making this our most viewed page over the last week.

As the situation continues to unfold, our web data gives us a real-time view into what people are worried about and the problems they’re facing. Below we outline some of the big areas where people have concerns due to coronavirus, and how these have changed over the last fortnight.

From holidays to sick pay

2 weeks ago most of us were still going into work and meeting up with friends. At that point, people were most concerned with how coronavirus might affect their holidays.

On 14 March our 5th most visited webpage was on claiming compensation if your flight is delayed or cancelled, with over 3,300 views that day.

Things changed rapidly as the government started advising people to work from home, self-isolate if they had certain symptoms, and to avoid unnecessary social contact.

Understandably, people started to worry about whether they’d get paid if they had to self-isolate. The number of visits to our pages about statutory sick pay went through the roof. On 17 March our page on sick pay entitlement became the number 1 most viewed page with over 31,000 views.

Concerns about work

As the impact of self-isolation and social distancing on the economy became clear, we saw instances of companies making large parts of their workforce redundant. People became worried about how they would cope. We saw spikes in people viewing our advice about being laid off and redundancy pay. Across pages giving advice on redundancy, there were 106,000 views last week compared to 36,000 the week before.

On Friday, the government made the announcement that all pubs, clubs, cafes, restaurants, theatres and other venues would have to close their doors to the public. They said that employers will be able to access support to continue paying part of their employees’ salary who would have otherwise been laid off. However, we know there are still concerns among self-employed people about how they’ll cope during this crisis.

We can see this through the spike in views for our advice page on the minimum income floor for self-employed people on Universal Credit.

And now?

Our data shows that people are getting increasingly worried about whether they can cover their living costs. On Sunday, the most viewed page on our website was our advice on what you can do if you can’t pay your bills because of coronavirus, with just under 24,000 views that day.

Supporting our clients

Our website is just one part of our advice service. On Monday our Adviceline saw its busiest week on record. Our Twitter channel has also seen a 1369% increase in messages over the past week.

What’s clear from our data is that people are concerned about what coronavirus will mean for their ability to make ends meet. Whilst the Government has taken steps to help ensure financial security for millions of low-income families, there are still questions about whether the measures announced will support all groups of workers, and whether further changes are needed, e.g. for self-employed people.

Our data puts us in a unique position to understand the different impacts of coronavirus on people’s lives. That’s why we’ll be sharing regular updates on what we’re finding to highlight what more needs to happen to protect people during this crisis.