Previously submitted to: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (no longer under consideration since Apr 16, 2020)
Date Submitted: Apr 15, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Assessing the Awareness of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Germany: A Google Trends Analysis
ABSTRACT
On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization characterized the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) a pandemic. In this situation, evaluating a country’s awareness of a disease is crucial. Using online surveillance, we aimed to assess when and how the German population became aware about COVID-19. We conducted a search on Google Trends from December 3, 2019 to March 20, 2020 using 5 keywords: Corona, Coronavirus, Corona symptome (corona symptoms), hände waschen (hand washing), gesichtsmaske (face mask). The data were collected for searches in Germany, and compared with the German COVID-19 incidence; Spearman's rank correlation coefficient and a time-lag was used for analysis. We found a strong correlation between online search trends and the incidence of COVID-19 in Germany for the following search terms: Corona (r>0.8), Coronavirus (r>0.8), hand washing (r>0.7) and Coronavirus symptoms (r>0.8). For these searches, online searches preceded the actual outbreak of COVID-19 from 1 to 6 days. The increasing incidence of COVID-19 in Germany correlated with people searching about that disease and related terms online. Google Trends may be a low-cost tool for monitoring the awareness of the COVID-19 outbreak and other diseases in the future.
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