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A comment on Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus activity in Fall 2019. Parent comment

Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by andrewtbham on Monday June 08, 2020 @04:21PM (#23460343)
Search query data Baidu’s database (http://index.baidu.com/) contains logs of web and mobile search query volume in China. User confidentiality is maintained, since only the relative term frequency data is available. We obtained daily data for symptom-related searches likely associated with COVID-19 illness in Wuhan from April 2017 to May 2020. We extracted the relative search volumes of the terms “cough” and “diarrhea” using WebPlotDigitizer, v4.215.
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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by dillondoyle on Monday June 08, 2020 @04:34PM (#23460454)
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...

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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by mellosouls on Monday June 08, 2020 @04:59PM (#23460742)
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.
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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by pstrateman on Monday June 08, 2020 @05:14PM (#23460887)
google in china is less than 5% of the search market
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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by mellosouls on Monday June 08, 2020 @05:41PM (#23461115)
yeah, I considered that - but its still presumably a large enough sample for the phrases listed in the parent comment to stand out.
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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by starpilot on Monday June 08, 2020 @04:46PM (#23460584)
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.
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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by dillondoyle on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @12:26AM (#23463642)
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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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by hef19898 on Monday June 08, 2020 @04:54PM (#23460681)
As interesting as this is, but my understanding was that the genetic evolution / development of the virus can be used to determine when it started spreading. Or jumped from animal to human.

Or did I understand that wrong? Not saying this study is wrong (no way for me to tell), it just seems a very indirect, and thus error prone, way to look at it.

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Re:Wuhan hospital traffic, search engine data indicate virus... by mellosouls on Monday June 08, 2020 @05:44PM (#23461144)
I've asked that question as a separate thread above, I think its an important one, at least for lay people like me.

There is a suggested reason for the discrepancy (Chinese dishonesty about timelines) tho not an answer (yet) from the researchers who've commented elsewhere here or others with a strictly scientific explanation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460742

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