Nowcasting incidence of emergent zika virus infection and its outbreaks using Google Trends data: Examples from Brazil and Colombia

摘要

Purpose: There is increasing interest in the digital epidemiology (harnessing digital and social media data to improve disease surveillance) of infectious diseases. Data from the 2015-2016 zika outbreak in South America provides an opportunity to develop and validate models that predict contemporaneous levels of zika virus incidence using internet search query volumes from Google Trends.