ArticleQuality & quantity2021
How do Google searches for symptoms, news and unemployment interact during COVID-19? A Lotka-Volterra analysis of google trends data.
Article in Quality & quantity, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- COVID-19: average time from infection to death in Poland, USA, India and Germany.Quality & quantity · 2022Article
- Association of COVID-19 with lifestyle behaviours and socio-economic variables in Turkey: An analysis of Google Trends.The International journal of health planning and management · 2022Article
- Reliability of Google Trends: Analysis of the Limits and Potential of Web Infoveillance During COVID-19 Pandemic and for Future Research.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this paper I exploit Google searches for the topics "symptoms", "unemployment" and "news" as a proxy for how much attention people pay to the health and economic situation and the amount of news they consume, respectively. I then use an integrable nonautonomous Lotka-Volterra model to study the interactions among these searches in three U.S. States (Mississippi, Nevada and Utah), the District of Columbia and in the U.S. as a whole. I find that the results are very similar in all areas analyzed, and for different specifications of the model. Prior to the pandemic outbreak, the interactions among health searches, unemployment searches and news consumption are very weak, i.e. an increase in searches for one of these topics does not affect the amount of searches for the others. However, from around the beginning of the pandemic these interactions intensify greatly, suggesting that the pandemic has created a tight link between the health and economic situation and the amount of news people consume. I observe that from March 2020 unemployment predates searches for news and for symptoms. Consequently, whenever searches for unemployment increase, all the other searches decrease. Conversely, when searches for any of the other topics considered increase, searches for unemployment also increase. This underscores the importance of mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on unemployment to avoid that this issue swallows all others in the mind of the people.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.