Photo: pixabay/Engin_Akyurt By analyzing searches, the official number of people infected with corona can include above all those people who have only slight symptoms but do not wish to or cannot be tested.
Photo: pixabay/Engin_Akyurt By analyzing searches, the official number of people infected with corona can include above all those people who have only slight symptoms but do not wish to or cannot be tested. The number of corona cases in the pandemic is a very important parameter. The number of unreported COVID-19 infections in Germany is generally seen as high, but how can we know for sure? Christina Maaß from the Department of Economics at Universität Hamburg has developed a new way to find out the numbers by analyzing Google searches. The study was published in PLOS ONE. To grasp the corona pandemic and evaluate the measures in the fight against it, we need to know how many people have gotten sick as exactly as possible. Yet the numbers are often incomplete, for example because at the beginning of the pandemic testing possibilities were not extensive enough, or because infected people-despite symptoms-did not get tested, or they did not have symptoms and thus did not realize they were infected. Analyzing large amounts of data on the basis of search engines or social media has already proven effective for other illnesses, such as the flu, in tracing infection dynamics, also because the data is quickly and freely available.
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