Is it Covid or fear of Covid that kills?

>From Google Trends data, we see very few searches for “COVID” between January 1 2020 and February 20, 2020 in the United States

Well, the name "COVID" wasn't even coined by the WHO until 11 February 2020.

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

You should compare the search terms coronavirus, nCoV, and Wuhan. (Although "Wuhan virus" now is a term only used by Trump supporters, for a while even Wikipedia had the name as "Wuhan coronavirus".)

Also, it's weird that I got downvoted for this entirely factual comment.