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Comment by andrewtbham | Hacker News Reader

Search query data Baidu’s database (http://index.baidu.com/) contains logs of web and mobile search query volume in China. User confidentiality is maintained, since only the relative term frequency data is available. We obtained daily data for symptom-related searches likely associated with COVID-19 illness in Wuhan from April 2017 to May 2020. We extracted the relative search volumes of the terms “cough” and “diarrhea” using WebPlotDigitizer, v4.215.

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wow just searching 'cough' on google trends seems to be pretty accurate just birds-eye view

would be cool to read similar research using US data, and the implications on policymaking.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

This always goes up during winter, you also have to control for all the media attention that COVID-19 is getting. People are searching just to be safe even if their symptoms are weak. It might not reflect growing infections, just growing fear.

The spike in the timeframe of the link I put is in mid March and the decreasing rapidly. Plus I think it's also cool at least intuitively the 'trending' states make sense - though I have no idea if they are weighted by population or not.

It's interesting - tho I've just plugged in China and various periods down to the last 5 years, and there's not an obvious jump beyond the seasonal ones until after December this year.

google in china is less than 5% of the search market

yeah, I considered that - but its still presumably a large enough sample for the phrases listed in the parent comment to stand out.

As interesting as this is, but my understanding was that the genetic evolution / development of the virus can be used to determine when it started spreading. Or jumped from animal to human.

Or did I understand that wrong? Not saying this study is wrong (no way for me to tell), it just seems a very indirect, and thus error prone, way to look at it.

I've asked that question as a separate thread above, I think its an important one, at least for lay people like me.

There is a suggested reason for the discrepancy (Chinese dishonesty about timelines) tho not an answer (yet) from the researchers who've commented elsewhere here or others with a strictly scientific explanation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460742

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