Our analysis of Google search trends further shows that people are most interested in getting the latest COVID-statistics at the local-level, but their information needs cannot be met due to setbacks in the reporting of COVID-19 numbers by government organizations.

By Anuja Venkatachalam

As we find ourselves in a global lockdown and times of uncertainty, it is no surprise that the internet is deluged with searches related to coronavirus. On March 16th, 2020 Google recorded “Coronavirus” as the most searched term in the world.

Similar spikes were observed during other epidemics such as MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. However, they were largely regional, and not comparable to the scale of searches received for coronavirus.

Search trends can provide useful insights into the information requirements of people, particularly in situations like these that involve changing circumstances and necessitate access to timely and accurate information.

Our analysis of Google search trends shows that in the case of coronavirus, searches are dominantly for the latest statistics on cases and deaths in a country, sub-region, or location.

As shown in the graph below, interest in coronavirus symptoms peaked around mid-March, only to gradually reduce by the first week of April; whereas interest in the causes and treatment for coronavirus remained substantially lower.

The relative popularity of “coronavirus” as a search term has gradually reduced since its global peak on March 16th. However, most searches related to coronavirus continue to be for coronavirus statistics. Web analytics revealed that there were 113.6 thousand searches for coronavirus statistics in a single day on April 30^th,2020.

Providers of Coronavirus statistics

Globally, the World Health Organization is the most popular source for country-level statistics, followed closely by Worldometer, and the John Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering’s real-time Global COVID-19 dashboard.

On April 14th, John Hopkins launched a US-focussed dashboard that provides real-time coronavirus statistics for every county in the United States.

In India, official state-level statistics are published on the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s website. District-level statistics are published, but erratically.

The absence of a real-time dashboard showing local numbers in India, particularly in the initial stages of the pandemic manifests in search trends. Search terms such as “COVID-19 India Dashboard” and “COVID-19 India tracker” surged in mid-March, around the time a national lockdown was enforced.

Several organisations have since come forward with real-time dashboards showing cases and death rates at the state level. However, few of them make accessible district-level statistics. COVID India Updates – a dashboard created by FETP-Network, and COVID Files – a dashboard created by Newsbytes in partnership with DataLEADS show a mapping of cases, deaths, and recoveries at the district-level.

Speaking to Health Analytics Asia on the challenges of making real-time information available to the public, Mr. Sumedh Chaudhry, co-founder of Newsbytes stated: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, creating real-time dashboards became a challenge as authorities have been sharing data sporadically, and in order to present the information in real-time, our team had to hack away to use several sources and build an API”.

Search trends indicate that users want more disaggregated statistics with search terms like “COVID cases near me”, “COVID cases in my locality” rising. However, the problem remains that the Government of India does not disaggregate coronavirus statistics below the district-level.