Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Dec 25, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 18, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 30, 2021
Understanding Health Communication Through Google Trends and News Coverage for COVID-19: A Multinational Study in Eight Countries
ABSTRACT
Background:
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, health information related to COVID-19 has spread across the news media worldwide. Google is among the most used Internet search engines, and the Google Trends tool can reflect how the public seek COVID-related health information during this period.
Objective:
To understand health communication through Google Trends and news coverage and to explore their relationship with early prevention and control of COVID-19 in the early epidemic stage.
Methods:
To achieve the study objectives, we analyzed the public’s information-seeking behaviors on Google and news media coverage on COVID-19. We collected data on COVID-19 news coverage and Google search queries for eight countries (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand) between January 1, 2020 and April 29, 2020, and depicted the trend of news coverage on COVID-19 over time, as well as search trends on the topics of COVID-19 related diseases, treatments and medical resources, symptoms and signs, and public measures. The characteristics of various trends in different countries were described and analyzed.
Results:
Across all search trends in eight countries, search peaks were formed almost between March and April 2020, and declines occurred in April 2020. Regarding COVID-19 related diseases, the searched peak for all terms occurred near or after March 11, 2020 across all countries, except Singapore. For treatments and medical resources, the term “mask” formed multiple search peaks while “ventilator” fluctuated modestly. In the topic of symptoms and signs, “fever” and “cough” were the most searched terms. The topic of public measures was the least searched. Besides, when combing the search trends with news coverage, there were mainly three patterns: the American pattern, the Singapore pattern, and the other-countries pattern. The Singapore pattern mainly saw two search peaks, while the trends of news coverage and search queries in the American pattern were in opposite directions.
Conclusions:
Our findings reveal public concern about facemasks, disease control, and public health measures. As a source of information, news media can influence the search behaviors of the public. According to public concerns, news media can be used to spread more valuable information, and thus achieve more effective health communication. Also, because public concerns varied in different countries and periods, news media can deliver more effective health communication based on the change of public interest. Governments and health care systems can recognize Google Trends as public needs in the early stages of a COVID-19 crisis, and can translate public needs into practices to better control the spread of COVID-19. Therefore, news coverage trends and Google search trends also contribute to the prevention and control of epidemics in the early epidemic stage.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.