Baby Shark YouTube views

Few things in statistics are as cosmically alarming as the suggestion that a children's song and the tip-over injuries of heavy furniture are moving in parallel. One imagines a small child, transfixed by a shark, reaching for a dresser that has finally had enough. The universe has a sense of humour and, one suspects, a poor sense of childproofing.

Both lines surge in 2020 because of the same household arrangement: millions of small children stuck at home with their parents, a screen, and a lot of heavy furniture. Baby Shark's view count kept compounding as locked-down toddlers watched it on loop — it crossed ten billion views that year — and furniture tip-over ER visits rose as the same children climbed dressers and televisions during unsupervised WFH stretches. The common variable is the hours a preschooler spent in a living room.

So the correlation, far from being meaningless, is a slightly heartbreaking inventory of the pandemic's effect on small children: more screen, more climbing, fewer eyes watching. It is the kind of data point that makes you check the straps on your bookcase. Sharks were not the issue.