Even if I were inclined to believe such statements without a link, this doesn’t make any sense.
For Google searches to spike, information about the disease would need to be public knowledge. And at that point, you wouldn’t need Google search traffic to prove anything.
So there was 0 searches, then ~90 searches suddenly? Yeah no sounds like just noise. There will always be some people searching about corona viruses, they always existed and we always knew of them.
to respond to everyone at once:
I didnt include the link because this is public knowledge anyone can access. It was provided below but the original search doesnt work anymore. it literally worked till today. I do have a picture of it I had taken, but HN doesnt provide the ability to share pictures.
It was a search for 'coronavirus' in china between 8/1/2019 and 01/01/2020. It showed a spike of 100 on September, 21, 2019 and another in December of 2019. However, this search no longer works. All of the traffic came from Hubei Province.
what gnulinux said about '90' searches is wrong. This is 'Google Trends is a search trends feature that shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google's search engine relative to the site's total search volume over a given period of time.'
IAmEveryone comments are just all wrong. this doesnt mean 'it would have had to been public knowledge'.
It means searches on google were performed on that term, specifically in Hubei Province. and yes, google is 'blocked' in china. That doesnt mean its not used there, just less often.
Science is a term being twisted out of its original context. if people keep doing that, its going to be a pejorative.