You SHOULD google your symptoms!

Early in the interview, Schneiderman talks about "Google Flu Trends" - the idea that Google can predict the way illnesses break out in different parts of the world based on the queried put into google. He goes on to say this often helped predict flu outbreaks before data from hospitals suggested there was a flu outbreak. Since this interview was filmed in 2018, I wanted to see if we observed this phenomenon during the COVID outbreak. A quick search says yes! Google trends (or GT) are often able to predict outbreaks of Covid around 2-3 weeks earlier than routine disease surveillance (according to National Institute of Health). This makes sense to me - quite a few people do tend to google symptoms - but the fact that it's a better predictor than other disease surveillance surprised me!