Singapore Slingers: Disease Awareness and Arrival Trends

Objective and Rationale

We hypothesize that public awareness of disease outbreaks correlates negatively to the number of arrivals from China into the US.

We measure public awareness using two metrics:

The popularity of disease-related search topics based on Google Trends
The number of disease-related articles from People's Daily, China's largest newspaper and the ruling Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper.

We focused our attention on global epidemics in the 21st century, particularly the ones that China was directly affected by.

This narrows our focus to the 2005-06 Avian Influenza (H5N1), 2009 Swine Influenza (H1N1) and 2013 Avian Influenza (H7N9).
In particular, China was the epicenter for the 2005-6 and 2013 Avian Influenzas, which makes them particularly relevant for understanding the current COVID-19 epidemic.

Other epidemics in the 21st century includes the 2015-16 Zika virus, 2013-2016 Ebola virus, and the 2012 MERS coronavirus. We excluded these for the following reasons:

The diseases were mainly localized within their respective epicenter regions (Americas, West Africa and Middle East) and China was not affected by the outbreaks.
There was relatively less public awareness of the diseases.
The diseases occurred within the same period between 2013-2016, making year-on-year changes in arrival data an unreliable measure of the diseases’ impact on travel patterns

The 2003 SARS outbreak would be the most relevant to the current COVID-19 coronavirus, as China is the epicenter and most heavily affected in both cases. However, Google Trends data before 2004 is unavailable.