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Figure 1. The figure shows how the relative frequency of google searches on global topics related to money, death, and love changed over time. The panel on the left shows data from January 1 - June 30, 2019 (no COVID-19), while the panel on the right shows data from January 1 – June 30, 2020 (during the COVID-19 pandemic). Google Trends does not provide the total number of searchers for a term (Burivalova et al. 2018). They provide an adjusted proportion of searches. The thicker lines correspond to daily values, while the smaller line in the front corresponds to detrended weekly averages. In 2019, google searches on love were the most common followed by death and then by money. Users’ interests remained stable through time except for a spike in searches on love around February 14, which corresponds to Saint Valentine’s day. In 2020, the pattern is similar until mid March, with the exception of a spike in searches on topics related to death around January 26, which corresponds to increased interest in the death of basketball player Kobe Bryant who died in a helicopter accident. Gray bars represent the global number of confirmed COVID-19 cases (Dong et al. 2020). Note that as the number of COVID-19 cases increases, there is a shift in the relative interest in google searches. There is a small relative increase in searches related to money. Death becomes the top category, switching places with love. Data used in the figure is available at