The pandemic was depressing for most people, but for the first time scientists have worked out just how demoralising it was: nearly five times worse than Mondays.

Researchers at MIT ran hundreds of millions of social media posts through language processing software to gauge the general population’s mood as the crisis worsened in early 2020.

Typically, people express the most upbeat emotions on social media on weekends, and the most negative ones on Monday.

The team found that, globally, the onset of the pandemic induced a negative turn in sentiment that was 4.7 times larger than the traditional weekend-Monday gap.

The researchers concluded that the early pandemic months mirrored the gloom of a really, really bad Monday.

“The takeaway here is that the pandemic itself caused a huge emotional toll, four to five times the variation in sentiment observed in a normal week,” said Prof Siqi Zheng, co-author of the paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Pandemic shock ‘worse than natural disasters’

The team found that Covid had a bigger impact on general mood than other emotional shocks, such as extreme weather or natural disasters.

Yichun Fan, a doctoral candidate at MIT’s department of urban studies and planning added: “The reaction to the pandemic was also three to four times the change in response to extreme temperatures. The pandemic shock is even larger than the days when there is a hurricane in a region.”

The biggest drops in sentiment occurred in the UK, Spain, Australia and Colombia, while the countries least affected by the pandemic in terms of mood were Bahrain, Botswana, Greece, Oman and Tunisia.

Lockdowns ‘had little impact on public mood’

The study also revealed a potentially surprising fact about temporary lockdown policies: namely, that lockdowns did not appear to have much of an effect on the public mood and, in some cases, made people feel safer.

“On the one hand, lockdown policies might make people feel secure and not as scared,” added Prof Zheng.

“On the other hand, in a lockdown when you cannot have social activities, it’s another emotional stress. The impact of lockdown policies perhaps runs in two directions.”

The research is part of the Global Sentiment Survey which studies mood based on social media, rather than public opinion polling.

“The traditional approach is to use surveys to measure well-being or happiness,” added Prof Zheng. “But a survey has a smaller sample size and low frequency. This is a real-time measure of people’s sentiment.”