Google Trends and COVID-19 in Italy. Could We Brace for Impact? (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Our hypothesis is that Google Trends could provide useful insights to predict the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. A search was performed using the Italian words “tosse” and “febbre”, respectively meaning “cough” and “fever” in English, and we analysed temporal correlation between Google trends and official data on increase in ICU admissions and new deaths from COVID-19 in Italy over the period between February 24th and April 6th. We visualized a lag period between trends in search volumes for “tosse” and “febbre” and ICU admissions or deaths, respectively of about 1 and 2 weeks. Therefore, we plotted the increase in ICU admissions against Google Trends for “tosse” and “febbre” 1 week earlier, and the number of new deaths against the search volumes for “tosse” and “febbre” 2 weeks earlier. A significant correlation was observed. Second waves of COVID-19 are expected and our viewpoint is that, integrated with traditional public health surveillance systems, the interpretation of Google Trends data could be useful to alert and prepare the healthcare system in advance.