Search engines, social media can offer early outbreak warning: Waterloo study – Toronto Star
WATERLOO — Internet searches and social media posts can sound an early warning about a disease outbreak, a recent University of Waterloo study found.
A real-time surveillance system for disease forecasting can emerge as people use online searches and social media for health information.
With COVID-19, researchers found there was an association between the virus’s prevalence and search engine queries and posts on social media.
“People usually do that before they access the health-care system or go for testing,” said Zahid Butt, lead investigator of the study and an assistant professor in Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences.
The team extracted symptom keywords from Google Trends and Twitter data in Canada from January to March 2020 — starting even before the pandemic was declared and when little was known about COVID-19.
The keywords included cough, runny nose, sore throat, shortness of breath, fever, headache, body ache and fatigue on Google Trends. On Twitter, they looked…
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