“Scientists Are Spying On Google Searches To Track The Coronavirus”

It turns out that all those frantic Google searches people make when they feel sick can be leveraged as a valuable public health tool.

A team of scientists from Harvard and University College London has found that spikes in Google searches for symptoms of COVID-19 coincide neatly with outbreak hotspots, according to an opinion piece in The New York Times by data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz — a system that could help public health experts better track, predict, and manage the coronavirus pandemic...

It’s not a new technique: scientists previously found a link between Google searches and syphilis outbreaks. Stephens-Davidowitz also wrote that doctors also tried to use Google data to track swine flu, but in that case the data was too messy to be useful because people were googling symptoms out of fear rather than because they were sick.