Abstract
COVID-19 has presented an enormous burden to critical care services. Reductions in face-to-face consultations has impacted families’ access to clinician contact and potentially encouraged the public to source information from the internet instead. 1 This has led to a loss of opportunity to disseminate important health advice.
We aimed to compare public interest in critical care medicine before and after the initial outbreak of COVID-19 through the use of Google Trends analysis.
Given that Google remains the most used internet search engine globally, 2 Google Trends was chosen as a proxy for overall patterns of internet searching. Google Trends (https://trends.google.com) analyses how frequently a specific term is searched on Google (https://www.google.com/). Trends are reported as a relative search volume (RSV), where a search count of 100 represents maximum popularity. Terms ‘anaesthesia’, ‘intensive care unit’, ‘ventilator’ and ‘intubation’ were assessed individually and restricted to Australia over the last 5 years (29 June 2017 to 29 June 2022). Descriptive statistics are expressed as a mean with standard deviation. RSVs were compared pre-pandemic (29 June 2017 to 25 January 2020) with after the first case (from 26 January 2020 to 29 June 2022) using a Mann–Whitney U test. January 25 2020 was selected as the cut-off date for the analysis, marking the advent of COVID-19 in Australia. The statistical significance level was set at P < 0.05. All analyses were performed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences software (IBM, Chicago, IL, USA v25.0). All data used in this study was publicly available, anonymous, and cannot be traced back to an identifiable individual, thus, no ethical approval was required.
From 29 June 2017 to 29 June 2022, the term ‘anaesthesia’ had the highest overall interest in Australia with a mean RSV of 61.35, SD 9.8. This was followed by the terms ‘intensive care unit’ (mean RSV 16.62, SD 7.5), ‘ventilator’ (mean RSV 5.48, SD 8.7) and ‘intubation’ (mean RSV 3.09, SD 2.6). The highest obtainable RSV of 100 was achieved once by the term ‘ventilator’ between 22 and 28 March, 2020 (Figure 1) and the terms ‘intensive care unit’ and ‘intubation’ achieved individual peak values of 58 and 20, respectively.
Google search trends, in order from top to bottom, of ‘anaesthesia’ (blue), ‘intensive care unit’ (red), ‘ventilator’ (yellow), and ‘intubation’ (green) over 5 years from June 2017 to June 2022. Each interval represents 1 week.
‘Anaesthesia’ was the most widely searched term: its RSV ranged from 71 to 77 across each Australian state and territory, followed by ‘intensive care unit’ (15–22), ‘ventilator’ (4–7) and ‘intubation’ (3–4).
There was a highly significant (P < 0.001) increase in RSV of terms ‘intensive care unit’, ‘ventilator’ and ‘intubation’ following the first reported case of COVID-19 (Table 1). The terms ‘intensive care unit’, ‘ventilator’ and ‘intubation’ experienced notable increases in RSVs (Table 1). A marginal decrease in mean difference was calculated for the search term ‘anaesthesia’ between the two periods.
A comparison of relative search volumes of the search terms calculated before and after the first reported case of COVID-19 in Australia. Data presented as mean (standard deviation).
There was a significant (P < 0.001) increase in interest for terms ‘intensive care’, ‘ventilator’ and ‘intubation’ in the week of 22 to 28 March 2020, corresponding with the closure of Australian international borders and initiation of stay-at-home orders. The largest spike was for ‘ventilator’ (Figure 1), which may be explained by the well-publicised high volume of patients requiring ventilation3,4 internationally. The high baseline interest in anaesthesia and lack of change in this, we feel, probably reflects the proportionally large baseline surgical volume and, therefore, the many people searching anaesthesia associated with this.
Figure 1 depicts five notable interest peaks post-March 2020. These dates correspond with various state lockdowns and rising case numbers. The largest peak was in January 2022, the month with maximal attributed mortality from COVID-19 for Australia. The start of this peak in December 2021 corresponds with the first Australian community case of SARS-CoV-2 BA.1 (‘Omicron’).
We have shown that the advent of COVID-19 in Australia signalled a marked increase in internet searches with terms related to critical care medicine, reflecting the interventions associated with severe COVID-19 disease. There was an overall high interest in anaesthesia from the general public, which did not appear to be strongly modified by the pandemic.
