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A Q&A with Michael Mina
In this series, the Gazette asks Harvard experts for concrete solutions to complex problems. Michael Mina is assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a member of the School’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, and associate medical director in clinical microbiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Pathology Department. Mina’s work revolves around disease testing and the development of new technologies to better understand the population and immunological consequences and patterns underlying infectious diseases.
GAZETTE: Is it possible to prevent the next pandemic? If not, can we better prepare for it?
You’re not feeling well so you open a search engine and type: fever, dry cough, hoping to find hints of what you may have. A handful of days later, you’re feeling worse, and you type in: trouble breathing. It turns out you’re not the only one who’s doing this, and a Harvard senior’s research project suggests that tracking the results of all those searches can tell us something about the progression of a new disease in individuals and through a population.
Tina Lu, a Leverett House computer science concentrator, analyzed search engine data from Google Trends going back to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic to see how well symptom searches in 32 countries on six continents matched the clinical symptoms of COVID-19 and whether the number of searches served as a harbinger of rising incidence of cases.