We apologize that the blog language is currently English.

The cities and towns of Denmark are empty. Kindergartens, schools, shops, and restaurants are closed. But where have all the people gone, and what do they do now? The KU Corona Diary will eventually help us to answer this question.
You can help us, by participating:

Link to Danish study: here

Link to English study: here

So far, about 1800 people have already participated, and we are very grateful for their support! Based on these people’s answers, we can give a first impression on the question raised above. Note however, that this first impression should be taken with care. We have not yet weighed the data so that it would represent the population of people living in Denmark at large. Moreover, in the short time, we have not been able to process the rich open entries that describe in detail what our participants have been doing.

Nevertheless, the first impression tells us quite a bit about what people are doing now. The figure below shows the most frequently mentioned activity for different times of the day over the past few days. It also shows us how many of our respondents have engaged in this activity. Thereby we get an impression of what people typically do, but also that many others engage in different activities, too.

What we see in this figure is that the people living in Denmark work quite a lot, presumably from home. And on the weekend, they relax, do housework, exercise, and watch quite a bit of TV. Moreover, watching TV is the most common evening activity and this is true for all days we have studied so far.

The patterns we see are in so far remarkable, as last weekend had beautiful spring weather. Under normal circumstances, watching TV and housework would probably not have been one of most frequent activities. But Corona times are different times! In brief, we believe our respondents take the message to stay at home quite seriously. But can we know whether they really behaved any different from what they would have normally done?

Unfortunately, we have no data from the time before the Corona outbreak. However, after surveying our respondents about their activities, we asked everyone to please “try to think back to the way things were before the Corona outbreak”. We then asked them, whether “at the same time and day of the week, would [they] have done the same activities”?

The second figure shows our respondents’ answers and their typical answer (i.e., the average) in red. We see that many have changed their routines. But others also do the same things they would have done before. But there is one time each day where people tend to do what they have always done: They watch TV or stream a movie or series in the evening. In the coming weeks we hope to find out more about the changed daily routines of the people living in Denmark.