On the day after we sent out our first update on the Covid -19 Tracker (Friday 22 May) the Dominic Cummings story broke. As in all the surveys, trust in the government has taken a nose dive. But here are the other insights of life under Covid-19 from 15th April to 7th June.
Life Satisfaction remains lower than January 2020, anxiety seems to be rising but not significantly. Health remains up but not as much. It looks like people are getting used to lockdown. The next few months as things ease up, schools do or don’t return and the impact of trust in the national leadership may provide some interesting insights.
Active Life: inactivity was up on January and seems to be rising. This is a concern, especially given the good weather and expectation that inactivity reduces as winter eases. We will be looking into which demographics are most affected as we suspect we are seeing a deterioration of mental health in those with long term health conditions.
Trust is generally growing in local community and local council. National government seems volatile and with an unsurprising drop the week after the Dominic Cummings story (we only have 10 days of data and a small sample for the first week of June), it will be interesting to see how this tracks in the next month.
Financial security and insecurity - we have managed to compare the current results to Understanding Society data 2017/18, this is the latest available data than has been made public on those same measures. Our sample is a higher socio economic sample so the financial insecurity is higher in national data - however the expectation of being worse off this time next year is almost double now what it was in 2017 / 2018. Not a huge surprise.
Volunteering has seen a lot of attention - a surge in help for the NHS, a new community spirit? From our data it looks like the 40% or so who volunteered in the last 12months in other ways (sport, church) have simply redirected their efforts to help under Covid-19. We have our doubts that Covid-19 has generated significant new numbers of volunteers - the existing civic core has simply responded as it does so admirably to a crisis. However, it is important not to take this for granted - millions of people have been first responders to community need. Volunteers are the nations backbone…
Work life patterns do not seem to have shifted materially but the June deadline for Furlough may see things change in the months ahead.
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State of Life.