Google Trends see coronavirus searches increase by 100x

You can't escape hearing about coronavirus COVID-19 in the news virtually 24/7, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that Google searches for "coronavirus" have absolutely skyrocketed in recent weeks.

Using the last 90 days on Google Trends and looking at Worldwide searches, we can see that things started to ramp up a bit in late January 2020 but died down throughout February. Google searches for coronavirus began steadily rising in the second half of February, and have reached fever pitch in the second week of March.

Leading the charge in Google searches in Italy, where the most interest in coronavirus searches takes place in the first country to go under lockdown over the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak.

Breaking down the Google Trends data to just the US, we see a similar trend line for coronavirus searches by Americans -- but the interest by sub-region is interesting. The District of Columbia (Washington DC) has the most searches for the disease, second only to Washington itself. Next up we have New Jersey, then Colorado, and finally New York.