After having written an article on the COVID related Searches in Italy (see here), we wanted to see when people across the globe had the highest interest in the ‘coronavirus’ term in their Google Searches. This would give a valuable insight on how interest spread throughout the world.
We consider this search index as a reasonable proxy for the informational need of the world’s population during the COVID-19 emergency. Here we focus on observing the local peaks of interest and how they are linked to local interventions. Furthermore we aim at observing how the interest spread throughout the world. Naturally, languages and alphabets are change in each country adding a potential bias making it difficult to directly compare countries. For this reason, we used the topic term Coronavirus by Google, which groups terms with the same concept (for instance Coronavirus in Latin letters as well as in the local alphabet). Another potential issue might be that in a minority of countries people search for Corona or Covid rather than Coronavirus and this might also change over time, making inter-country comparisons difficult. This is a study in itself which we will tackle in a future report. This said, the vast majority of the countries prefered ‘coronavirus’ (in Latin alphabet and in the local language) and even when this is not the case, a meaningful share of the population still uses it.
The index of Searches is given as a percentage of the maximum interest (=100) for a given time period in the same country, meaning that every country has its own scale of interest. Two different countries with the same color could have different actual values of searches but here we are just interested in observing the local spikes of interest within the country and when they occurred compared to other countries or events.
In Italy, we observed the biggest spike of interest on 23 of February, only a couple of days after the first 11 communes in Italy went on lockdown. That day, the searches in the rest of Europe were still at 10-20% of their local peaks. Italy’s neighbouring countries such as Austria, Switzerland and Slovenia were showing slightly higher interest. Within a few days, people all over Europe started googling Coronavirus. The local peak of interest in most countries occurred right after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID as a Pandemic (March 11) and when many countries implemented lockdowns. In Eastern Europe and Russia the interest peaked at the end of March or beginning of April. After those peaks, the general interest decreased again during April.
Here is a list of country-wide lockdown and curfews imposed by European Governments (source):
Lockdown interventions by Governments and Municipalities seem to have a great impact on the need for information and thus the Searches index. Partial lockdowns in Italy were followed by a new rise of searches with approximately two days of delay, reaching the national maximum. Two weeks later, the actual National lockdown in Italy coincided with a second, though smaller interest peak. France, Germany, Norway all observe their biggest interest spike on the first day of a national lockdown (or curfew). Interestingly, in Spain and Portugal, we observe the peak several days before the lockdowns were imposed. We can also see that, to a lesser extent, peaks of interests also flow over to neighbouring countries.
We further expanded our research to the world, despite the language and alphabet variations, as well as the potentially limited usage of Google Search in some of the countries. For this map, we show for several countries, their country-codes and the dates when the number of confirmed COVID cases surpassed the 100 cases in the country.
We observe the highest peak of interest in China two days after the lockdown of Wuhan city and Hubei province. Neighbouring countries like Mongolia also show a peak interest. During the first wave, we observe some interest in East and South-East Asia, while the rest of the world seemed to have limited interest.
About a month later, when Italy and Iran suffered a rapid increase in cases the interest still remained local. Though we expected also the highest spike in South Korean interest, South Korea and Japan had their peaks on April 4th (though this might be due to other words used to research - an issue not addressed in this report).
European countries all experience Search peaks around March 11, quickly followed by the USA and Canada. In the second half of March, many countries in the Southern Hemisphere experience interest peaks. In April the overall search interest decreases, though some countries like Japan and Korea show sporadic peaks that would need to be observed more in depth.
This preliminary analysis shows a visual representation of the search interest and how it spread throughout the world. The animation shows how, from a local problem of China and East Asia, it quickly spread world-wide changing the life of people all over the world. The map also gives us insights about the relationships between the public interest and the main interventions or spread of the pandemic. However, to be able to compare countries we need to tackle the issues of normalizing searches between countries which we plan to look into in future studies.