The impact of the basic dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and the number of COVID-19 patients on Google searches for vaccines

Abstract

Indonesia has distributed the COVID-19 vaccinations to its people starting from January 2021 based on certain priorities to deal with COVID-19 pandemic. News of deaths after the COVID-19 vaccination has made some people hesitate to get vaccinated. This study aims to depict the pattern and determinant of public interest in COVID-19 vaccine information using Google Trends data. The pattern can be used as a suggestion to the government to conduct a campaign on the COVID-19 vaccine. Several topics related to the COVID-19 vaccine were collected from Google Trends and then clustered by the province using K-Means. By total within sum of square, best number of clusters is two. Then, a logistic regression analysis was done with cluster as response variable to find out what factors made people interested in the COVID-19 vaccine topic. As a result, percentage of people who received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and the rate of COVID-19 patients who were treated had influenced public interest in the COVID-19 vaccine. Hence, the campaign must be transparent so that the public can see both the good and bad effects of vaccination. It will help to reduce the number of people dying after receiving vaccinations.