Suitability of Google Trends ™ for digital surveillance during ongoing COVID-19 epidemic: a case study from India

Satpathy, Parmeshwar D; Kumar, Sanjeev; Prasad, Pankaj

Background: India went into the largest population-level lockdown on 25th March 2020 in response to the declaration of COVID-19 pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO). Digital surveillance has been shown to be useful to supplement the traditional surveillance. Google Trends (GT) is one such platform reported to be useful during pandemics of H1N1, Ebola and MERS. Objective: We used GT to correlate the information seeking behaviour regarding COVID-19 of Indians with curiosity and apprehensiveness generated through media coverage as well as status of the epidemic both at national and state levels. Methods: We retrieved GT data between 1st January 2020 to 31st May 2020 for India using a comprehensive search strategy. We obtained data on daily tests and cases from WHO, ECDC and covid19india.org websites. We explored the trends of COVID-19 in the form of relative search volume (RSV) from GT platform and correlated them with media reports. We used time-lag correlation analysis to assess the temporal relationships between Google search terms and daily new COVID-19 cases and daily tests for 14 days. Results: Peaks in RSV correlated with media coverage or government declarations suggestive of curiosity and apprehensiveness both at national level and high-burden states. High time-lag correlation was observed between both the daily reported number of tests and cases and RSV for the terms ''COVID 19'', ''COVID'', ''social distancing'', ''soap'' and ''lockdown'' at national level. Similar high time-lag correlation was observed for the terms ''COVID 19'', ''COVID'', ''Corona'', ''social distancing'', ''soap'', ''lockdown'' in five high-burden states. Conclusion: This study reveals the advantages of infodemiology using GT to monitor an emerging infectious disease like COVID-19 in India. Google searches in India during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reflects mostly curiosity and apprehension of citizens. GT can also complement traditional surveillance in India as well as high burden states.