Silver lining of COVID-19: Heightened global interest in pneumococcal and influenza vaccines, an infodemiology study

Background Health-seeking behaviors change during pandemics and may increase with regard to illnesses with symptoms similar to the pandemic. The global reaction to COVID-19 may drive interest in vaccines for other diseases. Objectives Our study investigated the correlation between global online interest in COVID-19 and interest in CDC-recommended routine vaccines. Design, settings, measurements This infodemiology study used Google Trends data to quantify worldwide interest in COVID-19 and CDC-recommended vaccines using the unit search volume index (SVI), which estimates volume of online search activity relative to highest volume of searches within a specified period. SVIs from December 30, 2019 to March 30, 2020 were collected for “coronavirus (Virus)” and compared with SVIs of search terms related to CDC-recommended adult vaccines. To account for seasonal variation, we compared SVIs from December 30, 2019 to March 30, 2020 with SVIs from the same months in 2015 to 2019. We performed country-level analyses in ten COVID-19 hotspots and ten countries with low disease burden. Results There were significant positive correlations between SVIs for “coronavirus (Virus)” and search terms for pneumococcal (R = 0.89, p