With many working from home amid a new wave of COVID-19 infections, it would appear that Hongkongers are increasingly turning to, shall we say, self care to weather this time of social uncertainty.
Just to be clear, we’re talking about watchin’ porn.
Global skin flick giant Pornhub this week released new figures on viewership showing that all across the world people are turning in droves to BBWs, BBCs, DPs, BJs, ATM, and weird tentacle shit for comfort in a time of growing unease, with our proud little SAR definitely getting in on the action.
Comparing figures for recent weeks to an average traffic period, Pornhub’s statisticians determined that on March 17, as many countries around the world were beginning to urge people to remain in their homes to stem the spread of coronavirus, global traffic was up almost 12 percent.
Here in Hong Kong, where people had already been practicing social distancing to varying degrees for weeks, modest traffic bumps in February and early March gave rise to a massive spike in Pornhub visits starting around the middle of this month.
Starting on March 12, around the time authorities were announcing new outbound travel alerts as coronavirus outbreaks in the West worsened, Hong Kong traffic to Pornhub spiked by more than 20 percent, and continued to do so for nearly a week.
While we’re certainly no Spain (their traffic spiked more than 60 percent), Hong Kong’s Pornhub traffic rose to a peak of just over 24 percent above average on March 17, the last day for which data is available.
And while ever-climbing infection rates have sparked a global panic, let’s not forget the old adage that every cloud has a freaky-deaky faux-leather lining.
What we’re getting at is people are now searching for coronavirus porn.
According to Pornhub, searches for “coronavirus” and its variations (hey, it’s hard to type with one hand) have been continuing to grow since late January, with more than 9.1 million searches containing “corona” or “covid” being logged in the last 30 days.
While Slovakians are currently the thirstiest for coronavirus-themed ugly-bumping (they’re 119 percent more likely to search for it than the average person), Hong Kong is definitely corona-curious, with SAR residents 24 percent more likely than the average person to use the search terms.
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