Correlation Between UpToDate Searches and Reported Cases of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome During Outbreaks in Saudi Arabia

Thorner, Anna R.; Cao, Bin; Jiang, Terrence; Warner, Amy J.; Bonis, Peter A.

For the 2 outbreaks in 2014, we compared the results graphically by showing the 7-day rolling mean for the number of Up-ToDate MERS searches together with the 7-day rolling mean for the number of reported cases. The 7-day rolling mean for the date of interest was determined by calculating the average of the sum of the daily case counts for the date of interest and for 3 days before and 3 days after the date of interest. In contrast to the analyses of the earlier outbreaks, for the 2015 outbreak in Riyadh, we reported weekly cases and did not calculate the 7-day rolling mean because we only had access to weekly data for reported cases. We calculated the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient for each daily (Figures 1 and 2 ) or weekly ( Figure 3 ) comparison of UpToDate MERS searches to reported cases.