Coronavirus impact | Numbers show these products are riding the 'lockdown crest'

Representative Image (REUTERS/Amit Dave)

The COVID-19 outbreak has brought about a massive change in the way people behave and carry out their daily chores. Today is the thirty-fifth day of India's nationwide lockdown, which will be in place till May 3 and may be extended further.

While novel coronavirus is adversely impacting certain sectors, it is emerging beneficial for some products and sectors. These products would have remained unnoticed or neglected during a normal life cycle, but are seeing increased traction during this period.

Moneycontrol has gathered some interesting data points on products that have seen a major spike in buyer interest.

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Let us take a look at the change in the online interest of some select products in the past 30 days. Data available on Glimpse shows that hydroxychloroquine, yeast for bread, isolation gowns, dumbbells, and cigarette delivery generated a lot of interest.

Meanwhile, products like handbag, perfume, backpack, alarm clock, and belt have witnessed a dip.

Website traffic behaviour during the current lockdown: Data for the last week suggests that the news websites have witnessed a major spike in traffic.

"Tracking traffic to government and news websites is an indicator of the public sentiment. A traffic surge would indicate the population is growing increasingly- worried about the situation. A drop in traffic would suggest a return to normalcy," said Similar Web in a note.

The chart below shows how the number of commercial daily flight operations started to decline drastically from the second half of March. At its peak, there were over 1 lakh flights per day. It has slumped to nearly 27 thousand flights in April.