One Redditor pointed out that the lines for Zoom and Google Classroom seem to correlate with the first and second wave of the pandemic, so we asked Khan whether he had a chance to look into it and see if there’s an actual correlation there:

“I didn’t get a chance to look at that as of now, because honestly this visualization became viral so fast, I really was still processing this whole thing. I mean, I never anticipated that it would become the big but I certainly found such statistical suggestions to be valuable. However, another reason why it might not be too ideal to do it is because it’s quite obvious that they would be correlated. I mean most of the subsequent searches after COVID, such as zoom, classroom, unemployment, vaccine, mask etc, occurred due to COVID, even stimulus checks. So those Redditors should understand that asking about this correlation is similar to, but not exactly the same, as asking if hunger and food are correlated. Plus correlation is not causation, so even finding a correlation wouldn’t tell much beyond confirming what we have expected.”