On High Alert: Australia Hits the Highest Volume of Google Searches related to Covid-19 Testing in June 2021
Data: Google Trends
The data uses the Google search trend for the topic “Covid-19 Testing”.
According to Google: “Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. This allows us to display interest in a particular topic from around the globe or down to city-level geography.”
Google Trends data are normalised by time and location so they can be compared over time and across locations. According to Google:
“Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents to compare relative popularity. Otherwise, places with the most search volume would always be ranked highest. The resulting numbers are then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics. Different regions that show the same search interest for a term don’t always have the same total search volumes.”
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Trends for Covid-19 Testing in Australia
As the first figure shows, since the start of the pandemic, Google search volume for Covid-19 testing has never been as high as the last week of June in Australia.
The outbreaks across multiple states and territories in late June led to a substantial increase in searches related to Covid-19 testing. As the figure shows, the volume of searches was two times higher than the level during Victoria’s second wave and the late 2020 outbreaks in NSW and Victoria.
This surge was driven by the outbreaks across multiple jurisdictions which led to them reaching record high volume of search in this topic.
In the last week of June, the search trend for Covid-19 testing hit an all time high in ACT, NSW, NT, QLD, TAS and WA.
