Taiwan's disease control against the COVID-19 has been widely approved by the international community. A recent study by a Taiwanese medical team found the increased google searches for "wash hands" correlated with a lower spreading speed of COVID-19 and was published in a journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
Dr. Yu-Hsuan Lin's team from the Institute of Population Health Sciences of the National Health Research Institutes applied Google searches for "wash hands" and "face mask" during January 19 to February 18 as a surrogate of national population health literacy among 21 countries, and examine whether google searches for "wash hands" and "face masks" would protect from increased numbers of confirmed cases of among 21 countries. The team found the increased google searches for "wash hands" from January 19 to February 18, 2020, correlated with a lower spreading speed of COVID-19 from February 19 to March 10, 2020, among 21 countries
The findings show that increased google searches in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thai for “wash hands" correlate with a lower spreading speed of COVID-19. Whereas, in Iran, Italy, and South Korea, low search interest in “face mask” correlates with more COVID-19 cases.
The team further analyzed that google searches for "masks" do not correlate with the speed of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The team expects that the increase of google searches for “wash hands” provides real-time indicators for transmission-reduction policies and population health literacy in the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. Moving forward it is noteworthy to examine whether the promotion of the population’s awareness of handwashing will still provide the greatest benefit to mitigate the pandemic, Dr. Yu-Hsuan Lin explained.
Source：台灣英文新聞/ https://bit.ly/2xPs9Vm
