  The recent emergence of a new coronavirus, COVID-19, has gained extensive
coverage in public media and global news. As of 24 March 2020, the virus has
caused viral pneumonia in tens of thousands of people in Wuhan, China, and
thousands of cases in 184 other countries and territories. This study explores
the potential use of Google Trends (GT) to monitor worldwide interest in this
COVID-19 epidemic. GT was chosen as a source of reverse engineering data, given
the interest in the topic. Current data on COVID-19 is retrieved from (GT)
using one main search topic: Coronavirus. Geographical settings for GT are
worldwide, China, South Korea, Italy and Iran. The reported period is 15
January 2020 to 24 March 2020. The results show that the highest worldwide peak
in the first wave of demand for information was on 31 January 2020. After the
first peak, the number of new cases reported daily rose for 6 days. A second
wave started on 21 February 2020 after the outbreaks were reported in Italy,
with the highest peak on 16 March 2020. The second wave is six times as big as
the first wave. The number of new cases reported daily is rising day by day.
This short communication gives a brief introduction to how the demand for
information on coronavirus epidemic is reported through GT.
