  The COVID-19 pandemic has generated disruptive changes in many fields. Here
we focus on the relationship between the anxiety felt by people during the
pandemic and the trust in the future performance of financial markets.
Precisely, we move from the idea that the volume of Google searches about
"coronavirus" can be considered as a proxy of the anxiety and, jointly with the
stock index prices, can be used to produce mood indicators -- in terms of
pessimism and optimism -- at country level. We analyse the "very high human
developed countries" according to the Human Development Index plus China and
their respective main stock market indexes. Namely, we propose both a temporal
and a global measure of pessimism and optimism and provide accordingly a
classification of indexes and countries. The results show the existence of
different clusters of countries and markets in terms of pessimism and optimism.
Moreover, specific regimes along the time emerge, with an increasing optimism
spreading during the mid of June 2020. Furthermore, countries with different
government responses to the pandemic have experienced different levels of mood
indicators, so that countries with less strict lockdown had a higher level of
optimism.
