Strzelecki Artur, Azevedo Ana, Albuquerque Alexandra
Department of Informatics, University of Economics in Katowice, 40-287 Katowice, Poland.
CEOS.PP, Porto Accounting and Business School, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal.
Healthcare (Basel). 2020 Jul 9;8(3):203. doi: 10.3390/healthcare8030203.
The pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has gained extensive coverage in public media and global news, generated international and national communication campaigns to educate the communities worldwide and raised the attention of everyone. The coronavirus has caused viral pneumonia in tens of thousands of people around the world, and the COVID-19 outbreak changed most countries' routines and concerns and transformed social behaviour. This study explores the potential use of Google Trends (GT) in monitoring interest in the COVID-19 outbreak and, specifically, in personal protective equipment and hand hygiene, since these have been promoted by official health care bodies as two of the most protective measures. GT was chosen as a source of reverse engineering data, given the interest in the topic and the novelty of the research. Current data on COVID-19 are retrieved from GT using keywords in two languages-Portuguese and Polish. The geographical settings for GT are two countries: Poland and Portugal. The period under analysis is 20 January 2020, when the first cases outside China were known, to 15 June 2020. The results show that there is a correlation between the spread of COVID-19 and the search for personal protective equipment and hand hygiene and that GT can help, to a certain extent, understand people's concerns, behaviour and reactions to sanitary problems and protection recommendations.
2019年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行在公共媒体和全球新闻中得到了广泛报道，引发了国际和国内的宣传活动，以教育世界各地的社区，并引起了每个人的关注。冠状病毒已在全球数万人中引发病毒性肺炎，COVID-19疫情改变了大多数国家的日常安排和关注点，并改变了社会行为。本研究探讨了谷歌趋势（GT）在监测对COVID-19疫情的关注度方面的潜在用途，特别是在个人防护装备和手部卫生方面，因为这些已被官方医疗保健机构作为两种最具防护作用的措施加以推广。鉴于对该主题的兴趣和研究的新颖性，GT被选为逆向工程数据的来源。关于COVID-19的当前数据是使用葡萄牙语和波兰语两种语言的关键词从GT中检索的。GT的地理设置为两个国家：波兰和葡萄牙。分析期为2020年1月20日（当时中国境外首次出现病例）至2020年6月15日。结果表明，COVID-19的传播与对个人防护装备和手部卫生的搜索之间存在相关性，并且GT在一定程度上有助于了解人们对卫生问题和防护建议的关注、行为及反应。
