Increased interest in acute pulmonary embolism in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic: a google trends-based analysis
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Increased interest in acute pulmonary embolism in Italy during the COVID‑19 pandemic: a google trends‑based analysis Loris Roncon1 · Marco Zuin1,2 · Stefano Barco3,4 · Giovanni Zuliani2 · Stavros V Konstantinides4,5 Accepted: 5 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
To the Editor, Acute pulmonary embolism (PE) represents a frequent complication of COVID-19 infection among hospitalized patients [1]. Doubtless, social media have played a pivotal role in spreading awareness and knowledge about the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during the lockdown periods in different countries [2, 3]. In this regard, social media have widely presented acute PE as a complication of COVID-19 infection worldwide with unavoidable repercussion. However, no data regarding the trend of interest among general population on acute PE during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy has been yet provided. In the present manuscript, we analysed Internet search data using Google Trends (GT) (https://trends.google.com) (Google, Mountain View, California, USA), to estimate the awareness and interest of the Italian population in acute PE during the acute phase of the pandemic as well as during the period characterized by a reduction of restrictive measures and the “second-phase” of the pandemic.
Loris Roncon and Marco Zuin have equally contributed to the manuscript * Loris Roncon [email protected] 1
Department of Cardiology, Santa Maria della Misericordia Hospital, Rovigo General Hospital Viale tre Martiri, 45100 Rovigo, Italy
2
Department of Morphology, Surgery and Experimental Medicine, University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy
3
Center for Thrombosis and Hemostasis (CTH), University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany
4
Clinic of Angiology, University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
5
Department of Cardiology, Democritus University of Thrace, Alexandroupolis, Greece
We conducted a retrospective analysis extracting the data from Google T rendsTM (https://trends.google.com) to explore the interest of Italian population on acute PE from the 1st March to 13th September 2020 using the term “Pulmonary Embolism” (translated in Italian: Embolia Polmonare). We started the analysis in March 2020, because the Italian government applied the general lockdown on March 3rd. Collecting the number of Google queries, we were able to generate and then analyze the trend over the entire study period. Data were extracted and processed according to Nuti et al. [4]. Data of daily deaths for COVID-19 patients were retrieved by the Italian ministry of health and then converted to weekly rates. As previously described, GT presents the results as relative search volume (RSV) divided for different geographical areas over a specific period. More specifically, RSV ranges from 0 to 100: the former value indicates no interest in the issue whereas the latter represents the peak search volume [5]. Ethics approval for this type of study was not required as no
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