Abstract
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has globally overwhelmed all sectors of life. The fast development of vaccines against COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the course of the pandemic. Methods: Global data from Google Trends was analyzed for vaccines against flu, BCG, HPV, pneumococcal disease, polio, and COVID-19. The time frame includes the last five-year period starting from 17 April 2016. Multiple training of time series models with back testing, including Holt–Winters forecasting, Exponential Smoothing State Space, Linear model with trend and seasonal components (tlsm), and ARIMA was conducted. Forecasting according to the best fitting model was performed. Results: Correlation analysis did not reveal a decrease in interest in vaccines during the analyzed period. The prediction models provided a short-term forecast of the dynamics of interest for flu, HPV, pneumococcal and polio vaccines with 5–10% growth in interest for the first quarter of 2022 when compared to the same quarter of 2021. Conclusions: Despite the huge interest in the COVID-19 vaccine, there has not been a detectable decline in the overall interest in the five analyzed vaccines.
Highlights
The Relative Search Volumes (RSV) from Google Trends (GT) [21,22] of Internet search interest among anonymous Google search engine users was analyzed with consideration of the time of the vaccination research, including the last 5 years starting from 17 April 2016
Data samples for statistical analysis was collected from GT for individual phrases such as: “flu vaccine”, “BCG vaccine”, “HPV
Our study found greater interest in the polio vaccination, the threat of the polio vaccination being suspended globally in the era of COVID-19 vaccination was not confirmed in the performed analysis
Summary
In March 2020, the WHO announced the COVID-19 pandemic [1], the unprecedented situation had an impact on almost all sectors of life. At the end of May 2021, it was reported that more than 3.5 million people had died due to the COVID-19 virus, and more than 168 million cases of the disease were noted all over the world [3]. The COVID-19 pandemic has globally overwhelmed all sectors of life. The fast development of vaccines against COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the course of the pandemic. Methods: Global data from Google Trends was analyzed for vaccines against flu, BCG, HPV, pneumococcal disease, polio, and COVID-19. The prediction models provided a short-term forecast of the dynamics of interest for flu, HPV, pneumococcal and polio vaccines with 5–10% growth in interest for the first quarter of 2022 when compared to the same quarter of 2021. Conclusions: Despite the huge interest in the COVID-19 vaccine, there has not been a detectable decline in the overall interest in the five analyzed vaccines
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