The Pace and Pulse of the Fight against Coronavirus across the US, A Google Trends Approach

• Main Authors: Mangono, Tichakunda, Smittenaar, Peter, Caplan, Yael, Huang, Vincent S, Sutermaster, Staci, Kemp, Hannah, Sgaier, Sema K
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 05-05-2020
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computers and Society
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2005.02489

The coronavirus pandemic is impacting our lives at unprecedented speed and
scale - including how we eat and work, what we worry about, how much we move,
and our ability to earn. Google Trends can be used as a proxy for what people
are thinking, needing, and planning. We use it to provide both insights into,
and potential indicators of, important changes in information-seeking patterns
during pandemics like COVID-19. Key questions we address are: (1) What is the
relationship between the coronavirus outbreak and internet searches related to
healthcare seeking, government support programs, media sources of different
ideologies, planning around social activities, travel, and food, and new
coronavirus-specific behaviors and concerns?; (2) How does the popularity of
search terms differ across states and regions and can we explain these
differences?; (3) Can we find distinct, tangible search patterns across states
suggestive of policy gaps to inform pandemic response? (4) Does Google Trends
data correlate with and potentially precede real-life events? We suggest
strategic shifts for policy makers to improve the precision and effectiveness
of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and recommend the development of a
real-time dashboard as a decision-making tool. Methods used include trend
analysis of US search data; geographic analyses of the differences in search
popularity across US states during March 1st to April 15th, 2020; and Principal
Component Analyses (PCA) to extract search patterns across states.