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Title: Vaccine Search Patterns Provide Insights into Vaccination Intent

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2021

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Abstract: Despite ample supply of COVID-19 vaccines, the proportion of fully vaccinated individuals remains suboptimal across much of the US. Rapid vaccination of additional people will prevent new infections among both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated, thus saving lives. With the rapid rollout of vaccination efforts this year, the internet has become a dominant source of information about COVID-19 vaccines, their safety and efficacy, and their availability. We sought to evaluate whether trends in internet searches related to COVID-19 vaccination — as reflected by Google’s Vaccine Search Insights (VSI) index — could be used as a marker of population-level interest in receiving a vaccination. We found that between January and August of 2021: 1) Google’s weekly VSI index was associated with the number of new vaccinations administered in the subsequent three weeks, and 2) the average VSI index in earlier months was strongly correlated (up to r=0.89) with vaccination rates many months later. Given these results, we illustrate an approach by which data on search interest may be combined with other available data to inform local public health outreach and vaccination efforts. These results suggest that the VSI index may be useful as a leading indicator of population-level interest in or intent to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine, especially early in the vaccine deployment efforts. These results may be relevant to current efforts to administer COVID-19 vaccines to unvaccinated individuals, to newly eligible children, and to those eligible to receive a booster shot. More broadly, these results highlight the opportunities for anonymized and aggregated internet search data, available in near real-time, to inform the response to public health emergencies. After reaching a minimum in June 2021, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases and hospitalizations rose rapidly throughout the summer across the United States as the more contagious Delta variant became the dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The vast majority of new hospitalizations across the US in mid-to-late 2021 have been occurring among unvaccinated individuals. 1,2 Despite ample supply of COVID-19 vaccines, the proportion of fully vaccinated individuals remains below recommended levels across much of the US. Specifically, as of October 20, 2021, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that only 57% of Americans (67% of the population ≥ 12 years of age) have been fully vaccinated (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker). Rapid vaccination of additional people will prevent new infections among both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated, reduce the severity of infections among the vaccinated, and thus, save lives. With the rapid roll out of vaccination efforts this year, the internet has become a dominant source of information (and misinformation) about COVID-19 vaccines, their safety and efficacy, and their availability. Prior studies have shown that internet search patterns based on anonymized and aggregated data can be used to predict the occurrence of Lyme disease and outbreaks of influenza; to nowcast COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; and to identify food establishments that would benefit from food safety inspections to limit the further spread of food borne illness. Internet search patterns may similarly provide novel insights that could be used to inform public health efforts to increase vaccination uptake, but this hypothesis has not been examined in detail. Internet searches related to COVID-19 vaccines began rising in January 2021 and then rose further starting in March. 8 Early evidence suggests that internet search activity (aggregated to the state level) is associated with higher rates of vaccination in that state. Google recently began publishing the COVID-19 Vaccination Search Insights (VSI) index, a publicly available dataset showing trends in Google searches related to COVID-19 vaccination from January 2021 through the present. We sought to evaluate whether patterns in internet searches across locations and over time could be used as a marker of population-level interest in receiving a vaccination and, if so, to explore how this information might be used by public health officials to identify geographic areas with particularly high amenability towards vaccination despite low uptake.

Url: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.11424.pdf

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Authors: Malahy, Sean; Sun, M; Kr, Spangler; Jh, Leibler; Kj, Lane; Bavadekar S, ; Kamath C, ; Kumok A, ; Sun Y, ; Gupta J, ; Griffith T, ; Boulanger A, ; Young M, ; Stanton C, ; Mayer Y, ; Smith K, ; Shekel T, ; Chou K, ; Corrado G, ; Ji, Levy; Aa, Szpiro; Gabrilovich E, ; Wellenius Ga,

Publisher: arXiv

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Health, Population Health and Health Systems

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