Microsoft Research, Herzliya, Israel.
Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa, Israel.
Sci Rep. 2022 Feb 11;12(1):2373. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-06340-2.
Prior work has shown the utility of using Internet searches to track the incidence of different respiratory illnesses. Similarly, people who suffer from COVID-19 may query for their symptoms prior to accessing the medical system (or in lieu of it). To assist in the UK government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic we analyzed searches for relevant symptoms on the Bing web search engine from users in England to identify areas of the country where unexpected rises in relevant symptom searches occurred. These were reported weekly to the UK Health Security Agency to assist in their monitoring of the pandemic. Our analysis shows that searches for "fever" and "cough" were the most correlated with future case counts during the initial stages of the pandemic, with searches preceding case counts by up to 21 days. Unexpected rises in search patterns were predictive of anomalous rises in future case counts within a week, reaching an Area Under Curve of 0.82 during the initial phase of the pandemic, and later reducing due to changes in symptom presentation. Thus, analysis of regional searches for symptoms can provide an early indicator (of more than one week) of increases in COVID-19 case counts.
先前的研究表明，利用互联网搜索来追踪不同呼吸道疾病的发病率是有效的。同样，感染 COVID-19 的人可能会在寻求医疗之前（或代替医疗）查询自己的症状。为了协助英国政府应对 COVID-19 大流行，我们分析了英格兰用户在必应搜索引擎上搜索相关症状的数据，以确定全国范围内出现相关症状搜索异常增加的地区。这些信息每周都会向英国卫生安全局报告，以协助他们监测疫情。我们的分析表明，在疫情初期，“发烧”和“咳嗽”的搜索与未来病例数的相关性最高，搜索比病例数提前了长达 21 天。搜索模式的异常增加预示着未来一周内病例数的异常增加，在疫情的初始阶段达到了 0.82 的曲线下面积，后来由于症状表现的变化而降低。因此，对症状的区域性搜索分析可以提供 COVID-19 病例数增加的早期指标（超过一周）。
