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Correlating global trends in COVID-19 cases with online symptom checker self-assessments

Marc Zobel1, Bernhard Knapp1,2, Jama Nateqi3,4

  • 1Data Science Department, Symptoma, Vienna, Austria.

Plos One
|February 10, 2023
PubMed

Insights

Online symptom checkers like Symptoma can track national COVID-19 trends, often predicting official infection numbers by several days. These digital tools offer valuable insights for pandemic policymaking.

Area of Science:

  • Digital health
  • Epidemiology
  • Public health

Background:

  • Online symptom checkers provide differential diagnoses based on user-reported symptoms.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic increased the importance of these tools due to physical distancing and limited healthcare access.
  • Specialized checkers for COVID-19 assessment emerged during the pandemic.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To assess the correlation between online symptom checker COVID-19 risk assessments and infection trends.
  • To analyze if correlations reflect country-wise quality of life.
  • To determine if symptom checker trends predict or lag behind official infection data.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized COVID-19 risk assessment data from the Symptoma checker across 18 countries.
  • Analyzed spatial and temporal features of the dataset.
  • Compared symptom checker data with official newly confirmed COVID-19 case numbers.

Main Results:

  • Found an average correlation of 0.342 between high-risk assessments and official COVID-19 case numbers.
  • Identified a significant relationship between correlation strength and a country's self-reported health.
  • Determined that symptom checker data leads official infection numbers by a median of 3 days.

Conclusions:

  • Online symptom checkers effectively capture national-level coronavirus infection trends.
  • These tools serve as a valuable, unconventional data source for pandemic policymaking.
Abstract

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