Searching for the peak: Google Trends and the first COVID-19 wave in Italy

IF 0.4 Q4 ECONOMICS

International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics Pub Date : 2022-01-01 DOI:10.1504/ijcee.2022.10047365

L. Serlenga, Giuliano Resce, P. Brunori

引用次数: 0

Abstract

One of the difficulties faced by policymakers during the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy was the monitoring of the virus diffusion. Due to changes in the criteria and insufficient resources to test all suspected cases, the number of 'confirmed infected' rapidly proved to be unreliably reported by official statistics. We explore the possibility of using information obtained from Google Trends to predict the evolution of the epidemic. Following the most recent developments on the statistical analysis of longitudinal data, we estimate a dynamic heterogeneous panel. This approach allows to takes into account the presence of common shocks and unobserved components in the error term both likely to occur in this context. We find that Google queries contain useful information to predict number patients admitted to the intensive care units, number of deaths and excess mortality in Italian regions.

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搜索峰值:谷歌趋势和意大利的第一波COVID-19浪潮

在意大利COVID-19疫情期间，政策制定者面临的困难之一是监测病毒扩散。由于标准的变化和检测所有疑似病例的资源不足，官方统计报告的“确诊感染”人数很快被证明是不可靠的。我们探讨了利用从谷歌Trends获得的信息来预测该流行病演变的可能性。根据纵向数据统计分析的最新发展，我们估计了一个动态异质性面板。这种方法可以考虑到在这种情况下可能发生的共同冲击和误差项中未观察到的成分的存在。我们发现谷歌查询包含有用的信息，可以预测意大利地区入住重症监护病房的患者人数、死亡人数和超额死亡率。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

0.60

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： IJCEE explores the intersection of economics, econometrics and computation. It investigates the application of recent computational techniques to all branches of economic modelling, both theoretical and empirical. IJCEE aims at an international and multidisciplinary standing, promoting rigorous quantitative examination of relevant economic issues and policy analyses. The journal''s research areas include computational economic modelling, computational econometrics and statistics and simulation methods. It is an internationally competitive, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to stimulating discussion at the forefront of economic and econometric research. Topics covered include: -Computational Economics: Computational techniques applied to economic problems and policies, Agent-based modelling, Control and game theory, General equilibrium models, Optimisation methods, Economic dynamics, Software development and implementation, -Econometrics: Applied micro and macro econometrics, Monte Carlo simulation, Robustness and sensitivity analysis, Bayesian econometrics, Time series analysis and forecasting techniques, Operational research methods with applications to economics, Software development and implementation.