Our study demonstrated a weak correlation between GHT and COVID-19 incidence for most African countries. Important increases for COVID-19 death incidence were observed for Seychelles and Tunisia. COVID-19 burden in Africa increased steadily during the study period. We also assembled 72 variables assessing Internet accessibility, demographics, economics, health, and others, for each country, to summarize potential mechanisms linking GHT searches and COVID-19 incidence. The terms were related to weekly COVID-19 case incidences for the entire study period via multiple linear and weighted linear regression analyses. We used GHT to characterize COVID-19 incidence across Africa, collecting numbers of searches from GHT related to COVID-19 using four terms: ‘coronavirus’, ‘coronavirus symptoms’, ‘COVID19’, and ‘pandemic’. ![]() Average case and death incidences were calculated during these four time periods to measure disease severity. We collected COVID-19 case and death incidence for 54 African countries and obtained averages for four, five-month study periods in 2020–2021. Google Health Trends (GHT), a free Internet tool, may be valuable to help anticipate outbreaks, identify disease hotspots, or understand the patterns of disease surveillance. Prevention and surveillance remains the cornerstone of interventions to halt the further spread of COVID-19. From these numbers, over 12 million cases and over 250 thousand deaths have occurred on the African continent as of May 2022. ![]() The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 500 million cases and over six million deaths globally.
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