Anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic
Searches about anxiety reach all-time high during pandemic, according to analysis.
Anxiety about the spread of the coronavirus led to the biggest surge in Google searches on the topic in the spring.
The number of Americans who Googled information about panic and anxiety attacks reached a 16- year high this spring, when coronavirus cases began spreading across the country, according to a new study. Researchers at the Qualcomm Institute’s Center for Data Driven Health at the University of California San Diego examined internet searches related to acute anxiety during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Acute anxiety, including colloquially called anxiety attacks or panic attacks, wasmonitored because of its higher prevalence relative to other mental health problems,” the group wrote in a paper published last week in the Journal of the AmericanMedical Association.
Using Google Trends, the researchers monitored the daily fraction of all internet searches that included the terms “anxiety “or “panic” in combination with “attack” (including panic attack, signs of anxiety attack, anxiety attack symptoms) that originated fromtheUnited States from January 1, 2004, through
May 4, 2020.
“All acute anxiety queries were cumulatively 11%(95% CI, 7%-14%) higher than expectedfor the 58-day period that startedwhen President Trump first declared a national emergency (March 13, 2020) and endedwith the last availabledateof data( May 9,2020),” the researchers wrote .“This spike was a new all time high for acute anxiety searches. In absolute terms this translates to approximately 375,000 more searches than expected for a total of 3.4 million searches.”
Thelargest increase inacute anxiety queries occurred March 28, 2020, with 52% more queries than expected during normal times. On that date, the U.S. passed 2,000 deaths from COVID-19.
Two other spikes occurred March 16, when social distancing guidelines were first put in place, and March 29, when those guidelines were extended.
Increaseswere also seenApril 3, when the Centers forDisease Control and Prevention in Atlanta recommended wearing face masks, and April 11, when the U.S. passed Italy for most deaths from C OVID -19.
The group found queries began to return to normal levels onApril 15 and have remained at expected levels, “perhaps because Americans have become more resilient to the societal fallout fromCOVID19 or because they had already received whatever benefit they could from searching the internet,” they wrote.