Web-based surveillance of respiratory infection outbreaks: retrospective analysis of Italian COVID-19 epidemic waves using Google Trends.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Large-scale diagnostic testing has been proven insufficient to promptly monitor the spread of the Coronavirus disease 2019. Electronic resources may provide better insight into the early detection of epidemics. We aimed to retrospectively explore whether the Google search volume has been useful in detecting Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus outbreaks early compared to the swab-based surveillance system.

Methods

The Google Trends website was used by applying the research to three Italian regions (Lombardy, Marche, and Sicily), covering 16 million Italian citizens. An autoregressive-moving-average model was fitted, and residual charts were plotted to detect outliers in weekly searches of five keywords. Signals that occurred during periods labelled as f

SUBMITTER: Porcu G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10233021 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature