Data available from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) does indicate that there has been a decrease in the overall number of patents filed during the 2020 year.
This figure displays the CIPO’s patent filings as reported by their monthly production statistics. It shows that surges in the number of Canadian COVID-19 cases are correlated with application filings and show that patent filings dropped from 38,825 in 2019 to 36,173 in 2020 (a 6.8% decrease) with the largest downturns occurring during the initial onset of the first wave of COVID-19 cases and with surges in cases associated with the second wave.
The USPTO also has seen a dropoff in applications with 597,175 filings in 2020 – a decrease of 24,278 filings from the prior year. 4 This 3.9% decline in activity was smaller than seen in Canada, and could be partly explained by the differential lockdowns and restrictions imposed by the two countries.
4 https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/usstat.html 2021-06-22 22:08. Page 5 of 1–10
