A growing body of research is using internet data to monitor public health. Amazon reviews of scented candles are one unlikely source
academic papers start off as a joke. But Nick Beauchamp, of Northeastern University, in Massachusetts, was inspired by some light-hearted Twitter threads during the. People were posting screenshots of negative reviews for Yankee Candles in which disgruntled buyers complained that they could not smell the scented candles. Wags online quipped that the reviewers probably had covid-19, which counts loss of smell as a symptom. Mr Beauchamp set out to see if the viral joke had an empirical punchline .
The Twitter jokesters had a point. Mr Beauchamp found that for every 100,000 new cases reported in America per week between the outset of the pandemic and the emergence of the Omicron variant in 2021, “no-smell” reviews increased by a quarter of a percentage point one week later . Research on perfume reviews yielded similar results.
His findings add to a growing body of research that uses internet data to track public health. This form of tracking has been used in public health since the late 2000s, but academic interest has grown since the pandemic began. Previous attempts have had limited success. For example, Google’s Flu Trends programme, which ran from 2008 to 2015, attempted to predict flu cases by studying search patterns on its site. But the system was prone to inaccuracies.
As at-home testing for the virus has become commonplace, fewer people are registering their cases in official databases. That is hampering authorities’ ability to. Models that look for online behaviour linked to covid-19, such as a spike in food orders in a particular neighbourhood or searches for symptoms, are becoming more relevant. Researchers are using the statistical models to warn of potential future outbreaks of covid when they are still in their infancy.
Although Mr Beauchamp’s candles can hint at the spread of covid, they cannot display the full magnitude of its transmission. But as data to track the virus becomes increasingly sparse, a variety of indirect signals may at least offer some guidance.
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