What are your chances of getting the flu?
January 3, 2013 | Comments Off
How many of your friends have taken to Facebook or Twitter to moan about the terrible symptoms of the flu? If not your friends, you’ve certainly seen posts from many other people.
Social media is the perfect place to track the flu and determine whether you should drive in your car by yourself or risk taking the bus with 50 other potentially infectious people.
We collected a sample of data from hundreds of thousands of people mentioning the flu to determine just that. As you can see, last December saw an average of 900 mentions per day. This December saw an average of just 700 mentions per day. Looks like there are fewer sick people this time around!
However, if you look at the trend within December last year, you’ll see that it seems to decrease over the month. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for this December as mentions of the flu are slowly but surely increasing.
Let’s hope that January and February of this year don’t show the overwhelming illness spikes that last year did!
Note: Click on the chart itself once and then a second time to see it full size
