ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 350 million cases and over five million deaths globally. From these numbers, over 10 million cases and over 200 thousand deaths have occurred on the African continent as of 22 January 2022. Prevention and surveillance remain the cornerstone of interventions to halt the further spread of COVID-19. Google Health Trends (GHT), a free Internet tool, may be valuable to help anticipate outbreaks, identify disease hotspots, or understand the patterns of disease surveillance. We collected COVID-19 case and death incidence for 54 African countries and obtained averages for four, five-month study periods in 2020-2021. Average case and death incidences were calculated during these four time periods to measure disease severity. We used GHT to characterize COVID-19 incidence across Africa, collecting numbers of searches from GHT related to COVID-19 using four terms: coronavirus, coronavirus symptoms, COVID19, and pandemic. The terms were related to weekly COVID-19 case incidences for the entire study period via multiple linear regression analysis and weighted linear regression analysis. We also assembled 72 predictors assessing Internet accessibility, demographics, economics, health, and others, for each country, to summarize potential mechanisms linking GHT searches and COVID-19 incidence. COVID-19 burden in Africa increased steadily during the study period as in the rest of the world. Important increases for COVID-19 death incidence were observed for Seychelles and Tunisia over the study period. Our study demonstrated a weak correlation between GHT and COVID-19 incidence for most African countries. Several predictors were useful in explaining the pattern of GHT statistics and their relationship to COVID-19 including: log of average weekly cases, log of cumulative total deaths, and log of fixed total number of broadband subscriptions in a country. Apparently, GHT may best be used for surveillance of diseases that are diagnosed more consistently. GHT-based surveillance for an ongoing epidemic might be useful in specific situations, such as when countries have significant levels of infection with low variability. Overall, GHT-based surveillance showed little applicability in the studied countries. Future studies might assess the algorithm in different epidemic contexts.
