On March 17, Governor Cooper ordered North Carolina’s bars and restaurants to close. On May 22, he moved the state into phase 2 of reopening, allowing restaurants to open at limited capacity and relaxing the state’s stay-at-home order, which went into effect on March 27. For the 67 days in between, many of us were stuck at home, trying to figure out this strange new world of Zoom business meetings and FaceTime meet-ups.
We wanted to get a sense of how our part of the world experienced this strange moment in time. So we looked at what people from this region were searching for online. Using Google Trends, we found the top rising search terms in Raleigh and Durham—and Fayetteville, because Google lumps them in, for some odd reason—for each of these 67 days.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at jbillman@indyweek.com.
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