ArticleJMIR public health and surveillance2022
United States Influenza Search Patterns Since the Emergence of COVID-19: Infodemiology Study.
Article in JMIR public health and surveillance, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Characteristics, Uses, and Biases of Studies Related to Malignancies Using Google Trends: Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Pooled it
- Multisource Early Warning Framework Integrating Regional Pathogen Surveillance and Baidu Index Data for Respiratory Infectious Disease Prediction in Beijing: Retrospective Time-Series Modeling Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- Surveillance System for Infectious Disease Prevention and Management: Direction of Korea's Infectious Disease Surveillance System.Journal of Korean medical science · 2025Review
- Digital epidemiology and infodemiology of hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) in Italy. Disease trend assessment via Google and Wikipedia.Acta bio-medica : Atenei Parmensis · 2023Article
- The Role of Heterogenous Real-world Data for Dengue Surveillance in Martinique: Observational Retrospective Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2022Observational
- Infodemiology of RSV in Italy (2017-2022): An Alternative Option for the Surveillance of Incident Cases in Pediatric Age?Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Linguistic Pattern-Infused Dual-Channel Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory With Attention for Dengue Case Summary Generation From the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases-Mail Database: Algorithm Development Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2022Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundThe emergence and media coverage of COVID-19 may have affected influenza search patterns, possibly affecting influenza surveillance results using Google Trends.
objectiveWe aimed to investigate if the emergence of COVID-19 was associated with modifications in influenza search patterns in the United States.
methodsWe retrieved US Google Trends data (relative number of searches for specified terms) for the topics influenza, Coronavirus disease 2019, and symptoms shared between influenza and COVID-19. We calculated the correlations between influenza and COVID-19 search data for a 1-year period after the first COVID-19 diagnosis in the United States (January 21, 2020 to January 20, 2021). We constructed a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average model and compared predicted search volumes, using the 4 previous years, with Google Trends relative search volume data. We built a similar model for shared symptoms data. We also assessed correlations for the past 5 years between Google Trends influenza data, US Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention influenza-like illness data, and influenza media coverage data.
resultsWe observed a nonsignificant weak correlation (ρ= -0.171; P=0.23) between COVID-19 and influenza Google Trends data. Influenza search volumes for 2020-2021 distinctly deviated from values predicted by seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average models-for 6 weeks within the first 13 weeks after the first COVID-19 infection was confirmed in the United States, the observed volume of searches was higher than the upper bound of 95% confidence intervals for predicted values. Similar results were observed for shared symptoms with influenza and COVID-19 data. The correlation between Google Trends influenza data and CDC influenza-like-illness data decreased after the emergence of COVID-19 (2020-2021: ρ=0.643; 2019-2020: ρ=0.902), while the correlation between Google Trends influenza data and influenza media coverage volume remained stable (2020-2021: ρ=0.746; 2019-2020: ρ=0.707).
conclusionsRelevant differences were observed between predicted and observed influenza Google Trends data the year after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Such differences are possibly due to media coverage, suggesting limitations to the use of Google Trends as a flu surveillance tool.
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