Exclusive
There are serious, even deadly warning signs of a resurgence of coronavirus after we re-emerge from self-quarantine because there’s been A LOT of activity on dating/sex apps.
There’s an app, Sensor Tower, that gives insights into traffic on popular dating/sex apps, including, Tinder, Bumble and Grindr … and millions and millions of people are, at the very least, looking for love, and at worst, hooking up with strangers.
A month ago, just before we all started settling into our hermetically-sealed lives, Tinder had weekly traffic of around 9.3 million users. It has since surged to 10.2 million … mind you, when most of us are in quarantine. And the users are definitely in the market for something, because on March 29th alone, Tinder users swiped 3 BILLION times.
Grindr’s been heating up over the last two weeks as well, with more people flocking to the app than any time this year. Roughly a month ago Grindr had 1.29 weekly active users, but a month later that number swelled to 1.57 million users.
Bumble had 3.63 million users a month ago … it swelled to 3.88 mil in the final week of March, and now it’s stable at 3.67 million users.
App downloads are way up too, according to Sensor Tower data. Between Tinder, Grindr and Bumble, there were 2 million downloads in March alone — either new accounts or people re-downloading their account on other devices — and downloads for this month are approaching 1 mil.
The upshot … based on people we’ve spoken with in preparing this story, people on the apps — some but not all — are still hooking up, which is insane and unsafe and puts not only themselves but loved ones at risk of getting sick or dying from COVID19.
What we’re hearing from making a bunch of calls … some people are using the apps to just get to know people during self-quarantine. So the question … what do you think’s going to happen when we’re out of self-quarantine and young people who have been living like shut-ins are suddenly unleashed in the dating pool, and they’ve connected with people on the various apps? In case it needs to be said, it’s not sex with strangers in itself that dangerous… it’s the close contact that’s a recipe for transmission of the virus.