--- title: "You Can Track COVID Outbreaks by Google Searches, Scientists Say" description: "Researchers say that public health officials should be able to identify COVID outbreaks, Bloomberg reports, by examining Google searches." date: "2020-09-14" modified: "2020-09-14" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/track-covid-outbreaks-google-searches" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Developments" - "Google" - "Health & Medicine" tags: - "coronavirus" - "covid-19" - "Google" - "health" --- # You Can Track COVID Outbreaks by Google Searches, Scientists Say ![Researchers say that public health officials should be able to identify COVID outbreaks, Bloomberg reports, by examining Google searches.]() *\Image: NIAID/Google/Victor Tangermann\* Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital say that public health officials should be able to identify COVID outbreaks, [*Bloomberg* reports](), by examining Google searches. That's because the coronavirus causes, well, bad poops — gastrointestinal issues ranging from abdominal pain and loss of appetite to diarrhea. People get sick, the thinking goes, and google their symptoms whether they know they have COVID or not. And that means, according to the new research, that authorities could use geographically tagged data from Google to construct an early warning system for future outbreaks. The Mass General researchers, in fact, relied only on publicly accessible data from Google Trends from the early months of the pandemic, where they looked for spikes in searches for terms like "loss of appetite" and "diarrhea." They found that several search phrases seemed to be correlated with a looming outbreak, especially those associated with loss of appetite and taste (another [common early symptom]().) "Our results show that Google searches for specific, common GI symptoms correlated with incidence of COVID-19 in the first weeks of the pandemic in 5 states with high disease burden," the doctors wrote in [a paper]() about the work published in the journal *Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. "*Specifically, searches for ageusia and loss of appetite correlated most strongly with the rise in COVID-19 cases in high-incidence states." In [a post]() about the research, Mass General cites earlier work by Google itself, which purported to show that researchers could track influenza outbreaks by watching for search trends associated with symptoms. That work, however, [came under scrutiny]() after subsequent years failed to accurately predict flu hotspots, and was eventually [called off]() in 2015, when the search giant handed off the research to various institutions. ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()