New Measures of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A New Time-Series Dataset

Abstract

The multitude of papers exploring the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic over the last 12 months has motivated us to develop new, alternative measures of COVID-19. One limitation of current research has been the lack of robustness in quantifying the effects of the pandemic. We use a novel approach, word searches from popular newspaper articles, to capture key variants of proxies for the pandemic. We thus construct six different indices relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, including a COVID index, a medical index, a vaccine index, a travel index, an uncertainty index, and an aggregate COVID-19 sentiment index.