How COVID-19 elevates the wisdom of the academic crowd?

It is not unknown to us that all our online activities are monitored so that internet giants can use it to offer us quality services without charging money. In the current times, it would seem abnormal if we have to pay for Apple’s Facetime, Facebook’s Messenger, Google’s Hangout, as well as WhatsApp as we pay for the wireless providers for phone calls and alike services.
In addition to creating user profiles for placing more aimed advertisements, the data provides a way to identify the latest trends as well as a source of project needs for launching new products and services.
A good example would be Google Flu Trends (GFT) that made popular news in the year 2013 around the world. It was stated that the search queries, with their timestamps and locations, can be a good indicator of flu epidemics in various places of the planet. However, it was later found that there was a big gap from the data given by the Centre of Disease Control data. On the other hand, it needs to be understood that the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ hidden in the search queries is valuable. Moreover, recent research finds this approach promising when combined with the search data with the electronic health records for refining the prediction accuracy.
It is also true that the web data is tricky to employ correctly, particularly when it comes to tracking epidemics confidently. While writing this post, COVID-19 is storming the world and has already taken down China and Italy. At the current moment, both the countries, after having taken drastic measures, are experiencing low rates in the number of confirmed cases. During the first phase, cities were brought under lockdown, and schools were canceled to reduce the speed of virus spreading from one place to another. Three weeks after the outbreak was reported or rather seriously taken in China, the government of the country declared an emergency.
Google Trends reported that the search volume surged only after the day when China declared the emergency, yet the interests lessened within ten days. However, the search query started to increase again after the Official name COVID-19 was announced by the WHO.
Even though the search behaviors are valuable in getting the general consumer’s interests, but in the case of pandemics, it requires expert knowledge, and consumer behaviors are a lagging indicator.