ArticleLaboratory medicine2021
Clinical Predictors of SARS-CoV-2 Testing Pressure on Clinical Laboratories: A Multinational Study Analyzing Google Trends and Over 100 Million Diagnostic Tests.
Article in Laboratory medicine, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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0 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveEvidence has shown that Google searches for clinical symptom keywords correlates with the number of new weekly patients with COVID-19. This multinational study assessed whether demand for SARS-CoV-2 tests could also be predicted by Google searches for key COVID-19 symptoms.
methodsThe weekly number of SARS-CoV-2 tests performed in Italy and the United States was retrieved from official sources. A concomitant electronic search was performed in Google Trends, using terms for key COVID-19 symptoms.
resultsThe model that provided the highest coefficient of determination for the United States (R2 = 82.8%) included a combination of searching for cough (with a time lag of 2 weeks), fever (with a time lag of 2 weeks), and headache (with a time lag of 3 weeks; the time lag refers to the amount of time between when a search was conducted and when a test was administered). In Italy, headache provided the model with the highest adjusted R2 (86.8%), with time lags of both 1 and 2 weeks.
conclusionWeekly monitoring of Google Trends scores for nonspecific COVID-19 symptoms is a reliable approach for anticipating SARS-CoV-2 testing demands ~2 weeks in the future.
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