Covid-19 doesn’t dent our happiness… does anything?

A research study called the happiness index, which measures the sentiment levels of South Africans on a scale from zero to 10, has found that, despite the outbreak of the coronavirus, people in the country were happy.

South Africans were happier on Friday, 6 March – the first day of the Covid-19 outbreak in the country – at 6.67% compared to the average level of happiness for a Friday of 6.51%.

Wellbeing economist Professor Talita Greyling from the University of Johannesburg said: “This higher-than-usual level of happiness did not taper off, even as the second and third cases were announced as highlights in the SA calendar invoked tweets with a positive sentiment.

“Tweets were, among others, related to Kaizer Chiefs winning the Soweto derby, Ultra South Africa, which featured the world’s top electronic dance music DJs, and the Proteas beating Australia, [and these events had the effect of] outperforming the negative sentiment related to Covid-19.

“We make use of big data and big data methods to follow the sentiment of South Africans. We extract tweets and we use software to determine the sentiment of the tweet to derive a sentiment score,” explained Greyling.

“We analyse between 40,000 and 50,000 tweets per day.”

She said as most South Africans were concerned about catching the coronavirus, others handle their fears by joining in on the joke memes on social media. “This has been found to be South Africans’ coping mechanism to serious matters.”

• The happiness index was launched in April last year by Greyling and Dr Stephanie Rossouw from the Auckland University of Technology, in collaboration with Afstereo, a supplier of real-time data for marketing and research purposes.

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