Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 8, 2020
Date Accepted: Apr 15, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 26, 2021
Public interest in immunity: justification for intervention in the early stages of COVID-19
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of social big data is an important emerging concern in the public health. Internet search volume is a useful data that can sensitively detect trends of public's attention in a situation of an pandemic outbreak.
Objective:
Our study aimed to identify the interest and correlation between the proliferation of coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19), interest in immunity and products that have been discussed to confer an enhancement of immunity, while suggesting the measures of intervention to be undertaken from a health and medical point of view.
Methods:
To assess the level of public interest in infectious disease during the initial days of the outbreak of COVID-19, we extracted Google search data from the past year based on the date of 15th of March 2020, which is approximately two months after the COVID-19 outbreak. In order to determine whether the public became interested in the immune system, we selected ‘coronavirus’, ‘immune’, ‘vitamin’ as our final search term.
Results:
The increase in cumulative confirmed cases of coronavirus after January 20 had a strong positive correlation with search volumes for the terms ‘coronavirus’ (R = 0.786, P < .0001), ‘immune’ (R = 0.745, P < .0001) and ‘vitamin’ (R = 0.778, P < .0001), and the variables were all mutually statistically significant. Moreover, these correlations were confirmed on a country-basis when we restricted analyses to the US, the UK, Italy, and Korea. Our findings revealed that increases in search volumes for ‘coronavirus’ and ‘immune’ preceded the actual occurrences of confirmed cases.
Conclusions:
Our study implicates that during the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis, the public’s desire and actions to strengthen their own immune systems were enhanced. Further, in the early stage of a pandemic there is a high potential of social media to inform the public about potentially helpful measures to prevent the spread of an infectious disease and provide relevant information about immunity and thereby increase the knowledge.
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