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Internet searches for gastrointestinal symptoms predicted coronavirus hot spots, researchers find - Fox News

Internet searches for gastrointestinal symptoms predicted coronavirus hot spots, researchers find - Fox News

Internet searches for gastrointestinal symptoms predicted coronavirus hot spots, researchers find - Fox News
Sep 13, 2020 1 min, 1 sec

The study, published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, utilized an approach used more than a decade ago to monitor pandemic influenza trends, which researchers realized could be utilized to track COVID-19.

Using Alphabet Inc.’s Google Trends tools and Harvard Dataverse COVID-19 database, researchers studied search trends during the period between Jan.

During that time, results indicated that search trends most strongly correlated with cases in New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts and Illinois, which all presented high case numbers three to four weeks later.

“Our data underscore the importance of GI symptoms as a potential harbinger of COVID-19 infection and suggests that Google Trends may be a valuable tool for prediction of pandemics with GI manifestations,” Kyle Staller, director of Mass General’s gastrointestinal motility laboratory, wrote in the study.

The main concern that researchers noted is the lack of more specific factors in search results, such as "demographics, occupational factors, or Internet use patterns.".

"While our study provides information about popular search terms and their relationship to incidence, it is important to note that the relative nature of Google Trends data does not allow for defining specific increased interest thresholds."

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