Google Trends Data and COVID-19 in Europe: correlations and model
enhancement are European wide
Abstract
The current COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity to examine the
utility of Internet search data in disease modelling across multiple
countries. Google Trends data (GTD) indicating the volume of Internet
searching on ‘Coronavirus’ were obtained for a range of European
countries along with corresponding incident case numbers. Significant
positive correlations between GTD with incident case numbers occurred
across European countries, with the strongest correlations being
obtained using contemporaneous data for most countries. GTD was then
integrated into a lag distributed model; this improved model quality for
both the increasing and decreasing epidemic phases.