Public Interest in Immunity and the Justification for Intervention in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis of Google Trends Data

BACKGROUNDThe use of social big data is an important emerging concern in public health. Internet search volumes are useful data that can sensitively detect trends of the public's attention during a pandemic outbreak situation. OBJECTIVEOur study aimed to analyze the public's interest in COVID-19 proliferation, identify the correlation between the proliferation of COVID-19 and interest in immunity and products that have been reported to confer an enhancement of immunity, and suggest measures for interventions that should be implemented from a health and medical point of view. METHODSTo assess the level of public interest in infectious diseases during the initial days of the COVID-19 outbreak, we extracted Google search data from January 20, 2020, onward and compared them to data from March 15, 2020, which was approximately 2 months after the COVID-19 outbreak began. In order to determine whether the public became interested in the immune system, we selected coronavirus, immune, and vitamin as our final search terms. RESULTSThe increase in the cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases that occurred after January 20, 2020, had a strong positive correlation with the search volumes for the terms coronavirus (R=0.786; P