While the online Covid-19 conversations grew by 5% this week, the size has remained very stable over the last six weeks. When averaged out, the week-on-week change ends up being 0%, suggesting that we’ve hit a steady level of discussion. There were 3.7m people discussing the virus last week.

There’s some more significant movement when it comes to Covid-19 articles, though. The number of these increased by 13% last week, the biggest increase we’ve seen since mid-March. Publishers seem to be increasing the resource they’re putting into Covid-19 content.

Article engagements are up too, which you’d expect with an increase in articles (although this isn’t always the case). Having said that, engagements were up by 19% this week, with the average engagement per article up from 318 to 337. The increase in articles is paying off.

We also looked at some major topics of the week, based on the most popular articles. Here’s how they stack up when looking at total engagements.

We’ve reported previously on how articles about cases and deaths receive a lot of engagements. This is unsurprisingly still the case as both numbers continue to rise and are seen as a measure of how well government bodies are tackling the virus. For example, Florida makes the list thanks to the state breaking their record for most cases recorded in a single day.

Political stories also generate lots of engagement, with national leaders Jair Bolosonaro and Donald Trump placing highly in our list. Bolsonaro interest jumped after he contracted Covid-19, while Trump’s top stories this week referred to the US withdrawing from the World Health Organization and debates over opening schools (a popular topic itself).

Studying the same topics listed above, we also looked at how they performed based on their average engagement per article rate. For example, there were far more articles about cases and deaths than any other topic, which helped to up the number of engagements it received. But when we look at the average engagement rate, we get a different picture.

Topping the list were reports about a Texas Covid ‘party’ where attendees attempted to catch the virus, supposedly to see if the virus was real or not. A 30-year-old who went to the party has sadly since died from Covid-19.

The 1.5k articles covering the Covid ‘party’ story (a relatively small number compared to the 49k articles on cases and deaths) received an impressive 3.4m engagements, showing that even less-covered stories can still breakthrough on social media.

While it’s unlikely publishers will see the engagement they got at the beginning of the pandemic, there’s still plenty of interest in Covid-19 stories and developments. While the big political and medical statistics stories will continue to win traction, reporting on unusual events or outlier behavior will also help publications capture audience interest.

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team