As I write this blog post (May 18th, 2021), more and more people have been vaccinated against COVID-19. In the US, 47% of the population ever seized the first dose of the vaccine and another 37% are fully vaccinated (https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/). In Israel around 70% of the population are fully vaccinated.
I thought to try and find out what people were most looking for now that COVID-19 will not be a risk for them. I started with Google’s autocomplete:
As you can see, some people want to know how to deal with the immediate aftermath of the vaccine. They ask about Tylenol and other pain medications, but also how soon they can eat, drink, or smoke. Many people ask about things they could do before COVID-19 but not during the pandemic. These include travel and exercise (presumably at the gym).
A fun exercise is to look at these needs across U.S. states and across different countries of the world. To do this, I queried Google Trends for the volume of queries for each of these needs (e.g., “after covid vaccine can I smoke?”) during the past 3 months and also for the volume of queries beginning “after covid vaccine”. The latter served as a baseline. I calculated the ratio between these two volume indicators given for each state. On a technical note, Google only gives a normalized score for each of the volumes, so we can’t treat this as excess searches per-se. Also, if the volume of queries is too low Google does not provide a number and these are missing data for us.
Interestingly, the correlation between query volume for “after covid vaccine” and the percentage of fully vaccinated people in each state is quite high at 0.80, and only sightly lower (0.78) with the percentage of people who received at least one shot. Therefore, this does seem like interest by people who are getting their vaccines.
Here are maps for these ratios, first for the immediate interests and then for the longer-term ones:
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Side effects seem to worry everyone, but the least likely to be worried are people from South Dakota, Maine, Montana and Nevada. Californians and New Jerseyites really want their Tylenol. Once they stop worrying about their vaccines, many Texans would like a smoke and a drink (but drinking is also a favorite in California and Ohio).
As for the longer-term wants:
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Californians (of course?) want to go back to the gym. Travel is yearned for in Georgia, New York and Washington.
Worldwide the data is much sparser. This is probably because I’m looking at queries in English. Nevertheless, here are some findings of note: Folks in the Philippines would like to go back to the gym. Alcohol is sought by people in Mexico, UK, India and (presumably expats) in the UAE. This is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, in Canada and Australia. Travel features high on the list for UAE, Canada and Australia.
What does all this mean? Probably not much beyond the obvious, but it’s still fun to see it in the data.