NEW DELHI: After dominating the conversations for weeks, coronavirus seems to be falling off the popularity charts as netizens in the country went back to searching for topics like films and weather on Google in May.
According to Google search trends, the search volume for coronavirus in May was half of that in April even though the number of COVID-19 cases have continued to rise in the country.
'Coronavirus' dropped to 12th most searched topic overall during May, behind topics like Film, Meaning, News and Weather.
All these terms are consistently highly searched topics in India. This probably indicates that people are trying to return back to consumption patterns seen in the pre-COVID times.
An exception was cricket. With no tournaments being organised in wake of the pandemic, coronavirus was "five times more searched than cricket", showed the trends. The top trending search term overall for May was 'Lockdown 4.0', followed by 'Eid Mubarak'.
Netizens also sought answers to questions like "Which disease is related to coronavirus?", "Can asymptomatic people spread coronavirus?" and "Will lockdown extend after 17 May?".
The Indian government had announced a nationwide lockdown on March 25, which was extended in the following weeks.
The third and the fourth phase of the lockdown was imposed between May 4-17, and May 18-31, respectively.
On searches relating to coronavirus, Google saw volumes for "coronavirus lockdown zones Delhi" spike 1,800 per cent over the month, while "Italy coronavirus vaccine" saw 750 per cent jump.
The top trending topic related to coronavirus was 'Vaccine' that witnessed 190 per cent increase in May, the data showed.
The state/union territory with the highest search interest for coronavirus over May is Goa, followed by Meghalaya, Chandigarh and Tripura.