Covid in your searchbox!
How the world thinks about coronavirus
We used Google Trends to understand the way three different countries - US, UK, Italy - have made coronavirus-related searches in the past three months. The tool shows relative popularity of a keyword/phrase in a certain geography and time period as compared to the total searches made in that geography and time period. The relative popularity varies between 0 and 100, where 100 shows peak interest in the given keyword/phrase.
Italians vs Americans - who's more interested in the coronavirus?
First, let's look at how Italians and Americans differ in their interest in the term "coronavirus". Predictably, Italian interest peaks earlier because the disease hit them earlier. There is a sharp jump in Italian searches on Jan 31, the day the first case was discovered in Rome. The interest dies down until it skyrockets and reaches its peak on Feb 23, which is when a lot of cases came to light in Lombardy, and the situation deteriorated rapidly.
In contrast, interest in coronavirus in the US begins around Jan 21, when the very first cases were found, and tapers off to almost nil within two weeks. As more cases are uncovered in US and internationally, searches rise sharply towards the end of February to peak on March 12, and have been tapering off since.
One more interesting thing to note: the Italian peak is nearly twice as high as the American peak, and the relative popularity continues to be significantly higher, which goes to show how much more focused the Italians have been on searching for the coronavirus as compared to Americans, who have had other things on mind. Perhaps this a function of how badly Italy has been ravaged by the virus.
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| Relative Google search popularity of coronavirus - Italy vs America |
Don't worry, it's just the flu!
Next, to see what people thought of the mind-boggling comparisons between coronavirus and seasonal flu, we checked the phrase coronavirus flu (without quotes to include all searches featuring both the words) in the US and UK. Both countries see the beginning of their interest starting Jan 21, when the first US case was reported. UK sees a small spike on Jan 31, which is when its first case was reported. The interest in both countries then tapers off and starts to rise simultaneously around Feb 21.
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| Relative Google search popularity of coronavirus flu - US vs UK |
It's hard to pinpoint what led to the simultaneous spike. By this time, a lot of Right Wing pundits, including Fox News anchors, had started to make these comparisons, which could have piqued public interest. It can't be attributed to Trump's first known comparison of the two diseases, because that happened at a press conference on Feb 26, although it's likely that this helped sustain public interest.
The next spike, again simultaneous and this time far more pronounced, comes on March 9 - the day Trump repeated the comparison in a tweet (below). Correlation isn't causation, but the simultaneous spike makes the role played by Trump's tweet hard to ignore. The relative popularity of the phrase is expectedly higher in the US, but the matching trends in the two countries show the global impact the utterances of a powerful leader can have.
It should be emphasised that not everyone who googles "coronavirus" and "flu" in the same query necessarily thinks of the two diseases as similar, but there's a reasonable probability that this is the case for a lot of folks.
It's also interesting to note that Trump's March 24 Fox News town hall, where he repeated the misleading comparison, failed to generate a significant spike in either of the countries. Maybe by this time the reality had dawned on people?
Not even the flu, it's a hoax!
Next, we checked Google Trends for the phrase coronavirus hoax (without quotes), for US and UK. Both countries see a massive spike on Feb 29. Why, you ask?
Again, correlation isn't causation but it's noteworthy that Trump used the words "coronavirus" and "hoax" in the same sentence at a rally the previous day (though he didn't exactly call coronavirus a hoax). Expectedly, relative peak popularity of this phrase in the UK is only about a fifth of what it is in the US, but the trends are similar (a similar spike is seen for Italy but is much lower compared to that of either US or UK). The phrase saw another spike in both countries around March 10, but the reason for this is harder to pinpoint.
Usual caveats about googling "coronavirus" and "hoax" in the same query, apply.
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| Relative Google search popularity of coronavirus hoax - US vs UK |
Maybe coronavirus is the flu, but covid-19 surely isn't
Obviously, likening coronavirus to the flu is scientific blasphemy, so we compared trends in the phrases covid-19 flu and coronavirus flu, in US, keeping in mind that people googling the more scientific term "covid-19" are likely to be better informed about the disease than those googling "coronavirus". The expectation was that the relative popularity of the phrase covid-19 flu would be far lower than that of coronavirus flu.
Bam! This is exactly right. Both queries follow similar trends but the relative popularity is on expected lines.
Coronavirus really isn't the flu at all
There's good news - Covid-19 has become a more popular query than coronavirus flu. Moreover, the former's popularity is holding steady even as the latter's is dropping sharply.
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| Relative Google search popularity of covid-19 flu and coronavirus flu in US |
Which US states are most focused on the coronavirus?
Finally, to check how glued the different US states are to the disease, we compared the relative popularity of the word "coronavirus" across all states. NJ takes the top spot while Mississippi, where the outbreak is yet to spin out of control and which is also ranked one of the last on an index of social distancing, is the most blithe.
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| Relative Google search popularity of coronavirus in different states |
The Magic of widespread testing - How do Iceland and Korea differ from Italy & Netherlands?
Iceland, blessed with a tiny population of 364,000, has possibly the highest testing rate of all countries - 4918 for every 100,000 people, as of March 31. Korea's rate stands at 790 in a much bigger population of 52 million. Although we don't have the latest testing numbers for Italy and Netherlands, they're known to be substantially lower.
Higher testing rates for Iceland and Korea imply that they've been able to test far more widely and randomly than Italy and Netherlands, which have focused their testing on the older, at-greater-risk population. The share of infected population in both Iceland and Korea comes out to be much higher among the young than the old, implying that young people - possibly given their greater socializing habits - are far more likely to be spreaders of the disease while facing a lower risk personally. This is not seen in the data for Italy and Netherlands because of restricted and non-random testing. It's quite likely that democratized testing allowed Iceland and Korea to track and isolate the infected population early on, even while they were asymptomatic, thus leading to far fewer cases and deaths as compared to most other countries.
Read this brilliant Medium post and this twitter thread for more info.
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Unrecorded deaths show the real toll of Covid-19
The global toll from the outbreak is already huge but might still be a significant underestimation. The chart below from Italy compares the average mortality (blue line) between 2015-2019 to the confirmed mortality from coronavirus (green line) and the total mortality in 2020 (red line). The huge red spike must be a combination of unrecorded deaths from coronavirus and the increased mortality from other diseases, given that the severely burdened healthcare system is being unable to attend to those. We might get a better idea of the total toll from coronavirus as Britain has decided to record outside-hospital deaths.
Read this twitter thread for more info.
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The Great "Secession" of our time
The first three signature pink charts from Financial Times show the jolt to Chinese economy and the reduction in global traffic. The ones after that show the collapse across sectors and regions, and investor flight towards high-rated sovereign bonds in the midst of a stock market crash.
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Lessons from the last great pandemic - how to saves lives and economy at the same time
There's been a lot of talk about going back to BAU because apparently the cure - a complete economic shutdown - might be worse than the ailment, the outbreak of Covid-19. Drawing upon the Flu of 1918, the first chart below shows that the cure certainly works by reducing the death toll. Moreover, as shown by the second chart, American cities that had stronger restrictions in place also showed a stronger economic recovery once the pandemic had passed.
Read this Nat Geo article , this new paper, and this twitter thread on the paper for more info.
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