Info relating the worldwide outbreak of the flu-like and sometimes deadly Coronavirus outbreak of 2019/2020.

This post covers:

  • About - Info about the virus and outbreak.
  • Visualizations - External links where the corona virus outbreak has been visualized.
  • Google Trends graphs - Comparing the Corona virus to other high-volume searches and to searches for other major diseases.
  • News - Info from news websites.

About

“Coronavirus” is a more general term for viruses but the term has become associated with this specific strain outbreak.

The 2019-2020 strain is known as:

  • Covid-19
  • Novel coronavirus
  • 2019-nCoV
  • SARS-CoV-2

Timeline

  • The outbreak started in China in December 2019.
  • It was spreading internationally at the end of January 2020.
  • It started growing exponentially in February and March 2020.

Resources

What is the virus and the outbreak about? Wikipedia pages:

Other:

Visualizations

Links to sites with graphs or maps. Some get live updates.

Graphs I created around the topic and have embedded here. Each includes a link to the original graph on Google Trends - especially useful for seeing additional data such as map of countries, which cannot be embedded.

Coronavirus worlwide in 2020

This graph includes the Coronavirus topic which seems to have much higher volume than any explored topics or phrases. There are lot of ways people express this and this seems to cover the concept well.

As phrases, “covid” is used more than “covid-19”, plus there are some other areas that are lower volume and not shown, including a SARS virus topic.

source



Coronavirus cases 2020

People did searches relating to case of coronavirus. There are much lower volume than the Coronavirus topic itself but still useful to look at - especially when looking at the country map on Google Trends itself.

source



Coronavirus deaths in 2020

Although much lower volume than Coronavirus topic, the deaths relating to the virus are getting more attention in searches from March onwards especially.

source



Breakdown by country in 2020

source



Coronavirus vs holidays over the last 5 years

The Coronavirus has received more attention in Google search volume than the previous Christmas Day and some other major annual international events.

source



Quarantine

As the virus spreads, people and countries started implementing quantines, lockdowns and “social distancing” to contain the pandemic.

source

However, the attention to those topics is significantly lower than for the Coronavirus topic, shown below for comparison.

source



Comparison of outbreaks

Coronavirus vs other major diseases for the last 5 years

source



Other major diseases for the last 5 years

Corona virus is removed here as its large values make the others hard to read.

source



Lists of outbreaks

For context, the Corona virus and other medical outbreaks have been documented here:

News

Lists of articles

Articles

  • Coronavirus: First Western Cape case confirmed, three more await results on News 24.
  • Coronavirus IS a pandemic … on Daily Mail.
    • The WHO said it was ‘deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity’ of the coronavirus
    • A pandemic is the uncontrolled spread of a new disease – more than 100 countries have recorded cases
    • Europe is now the centre of the crisis, with growing outbreaks in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and the UK
    • At least 125,000 patients have been infected and 4,000 have died since the outbreak began last December
    • The virus has been spreading between humans in four continents since February 28, the WHO has admitted
  • How dangerous is coronavirus really … on Daily Mail.
    • Roughly 14 per cent of people with Covid-19 coronavirus need to go to hospital
    • Some 51,000 people around the world have already recovered from coronavirus
    • Covid-19 is between 10 and 20 times more fatal than the common flu