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Abstract
BackgroundAn increase in online searches on health topics may either mirror epidemiological changes or reflect media coverage. In the context of COVID-19, this is particularly relevant, as COVID-19 symptoms may be mistaken for those of respiratory disease exacerbations. Therefore, we aimed to assess Internet search patterns on asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in the context of COVID-19, as compared to searches on other chronic diseases.MethodsWe retrieved Google Trends (GTs) data on two respiratory (asthma and COPD) and three non-respiratory (diabetes, hypertension, and Crohn’s disease) chronic diseases over the past 5 years (up to May 31, 2020). For 54 countries, and for each disease, we built autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to predict GTs for 2020 based on 2015–2019 search patterns. In addition, we estimated the proportion of searches in which COVID-19-related terms were used. To assess the potential impact of media coverage on online searches, we assessed whether weekly “asthma” GTs correlated with the number of Google News items on asthma.ResultsOver the past 5 years, worldwide search volumes for asthma and COPD reached their maximum values in March 2020. Such was not observed for diabetes, hypertension and Crohn’s disease. In 38 (70%) countries, GTs on asthma were higher in March 2020 than the respective maximum predicted values. This compares to 19 countries for COPD, 23 for hypertension, 11 for Crohn’s disease, and 9 for diabetes. Queries with COVID-19-related terms represented up to 47.8% of the monthly searches on asthma, and up to 21.3% of COPD searches. In most of the assessed countries, moderate-strong correlations were observed between “asthma” GTs and the number of news items on asthma.ConclusionsDuring March 2020, there was a peak in searches on asthma and COPD, which was probably mostly driven by media coverage, as suggested by their simultaneity in several countries with different epidemiological situations.
Highlights
Google Trends (GTs), a web-based surveillance tool, can provide insights into the real-life epidemiology of diseases and outbreaks
In the context of COVID-19, several GT-based studies have been conducted with the aim of assessing whether online search data correlated with the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths
The three non-respiratory chronic diseases were selected on the grounds that (i) diabetes and hypertension are common comorbid conditions that have been associated with a worse COVID-19 prognosis and (ii) Crohn’s disease—like asthma—is relatively frequent in young people, and can manifest as diarrhoea
Summary
Google Trends (GTs), a web-based surveillance tool, can provide insights into the real-life epidemiology of diseases and outbreaks This tool provides information—on a relative scale—on how often a certain keyword or query is searched, allowing to compare different regions, time. Understanding whether the perception of symptoms of chronic respiratory diseases may be masquerading those of COVID-19 [15], or whether searches are being driven mostly by users’ curiosity/concerns, may have potentially relevant implications Such implications concern, among others: (i) the usefulness of GTs in the epidemiological monitoring of chronic diseases, (ii) the way the occurrence of COVID-19 in patients with chronic respiratory diseases is being discussed in the media, or is being communicated to patients, and (iii) the pertinence of Google providing health screening questionnaires following searches on certain expressions [16]. We aimed to assess Internet search patterns on asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in the context of COVID-19, as compared to searches on other chronic diseases
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