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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...

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.

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.

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