The relationship between public attention and COVID-19: evidence from the big data analysis of Google trends

ABSTRACT

We investigate the impacts of the public attention towards the COVID-19 on the situation of the epidemic worldwide and on public mobility with Google trends. We use the number of searches for two keywords ‘corona virus’ and ‘mask’ on the Google search index to show people’s public attention towards the epidemic. The findings show that confirmed cases and death rates are significantly positively (negatively) associated with the public attention paid to epidemic in the early (later) stage of the epidemic. The reason may be that in the early stage of the epidemic, public attention increased outpatient rates and therefore confirmed cases significantly, while in the later stage, public attention accordingly increased cure rates significantly. The epidemic significantly eases for people’s mobility trends when refraining from going outdoors. Such impacts are more profound for low-income countries.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• people’s attention
• public mobility
• big data

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I10
• I12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2/SARS-Cov-2.

² https://covid19datahub.io/articles/data.html

³ https://trends.google.com/trends Google search index. We use ‘corona virus’ and ‘mask’ as search engine key words to understand public attention towards the pandemic.

⁴ https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility

⁵ The baseline is the median value, for the corresponding day of the week, during the 5-week period fromJanuary3 to 6 February 2020.

⁶ https://data.worldbank.org

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72073086]; Shanghai Soft Science Research Funds [20692191100 and 21692194900]; National Statistical Science Research [2020LY048].