Canadians becoming less concerned about healthcare, more about relationships during COVID-19: survey

A recent survey by Statistics Canada found that over the month of April Canadians became less concerned with national and global health, and more worried about their own social ties and family issues.

Statistics Canada crowdsourced information from nearly 200,000 people to learn about the concerns and precautions Canadians were taking. They had two questionnaires — one from Apr. 3 to Apr. 9 and another from Apr. 10 to Apr. 25 and found Canadians changed their tone in some categories.

In the first survey, Canadians were more likely to be "very" or "extremely" concerned about overloading the health system (88%) in comparison to the second survey (78%).

Additionally, a lower ratio of people across all age groups and genders reported that they were concerned about the health of national and global populations.

Despite the difference, in the second survey people remained at least "somewhat" concerned about over-saturating the health system.

But, concerns arose in other places. In the second survey, a slightly higher ratio of people were concerned about family stress (a 2% increase), maintaining social ties (3%) and possibility of domestic violence (3%) than in the previous survey.

"This suggests that social concerns may have increased as the duration of isolation measures increased. Other concerns, such as personal health, varied little between first-week participants and second- or third-week participants," Statistics Canada said in a report.

They also found that people concerned about overloading the health system reported they were less likely to leave the house, and more likely to avoid large crowds and attempt to social distance while in public.