Searching for the peak Google Trends and the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy

Paolo Brunori and Giuliano Resce ()

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: One of the difficulties faced by policy makers during the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy was the monitoring of the virus diffusion. Due to changing criteria and insufficient resources to test all suspected cases, the number of ‘confirmed infected’ cases rapidly proved to be unreliably reported by official statistics. This limited the ability of epidemiologic models to predict the evolution of the infectious disease. This paper explores the possibility of using information obtained from Google Trends to supplement official statistics in order to predict when the number of deaths due to Covid-19 will peak in Italy. We estimate and regularize a panel model with regional and time fixed effects. Our preferred specification shows a positive and significant correlation between Google searches for commonly reported Covid-19 symptoms and deaths recorded. The analysis suggests that the social distancing measures implemented in early March in Italy were effective in slowing down the spread of the virus.

Keywords: Covid-19; Google Trends (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 D83 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ore
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Searching for the peak Google Trends and the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy (2020)
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