## 1 Introduction  
\"At every crucial moment, American officials were weeks or months behind the reality of the outbreak. Those delays likely cost tens of thousands of lives\". NYT 26 June 2020 [1]. Since the beginning of January 2020, the world has been turned upside down. Nothing is like it was before since the novel coronavirus disease was first reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 [2]. After initial blunders, China took energetic measures to combat the virus (e.g., the Wuhan shutdown) [3] while the Western world was still mostly complement. Although epidemiologists had already warned at the end of January that COVID-19 would probably turn into a global crisis [4], politicians and the population in the U.S. and Western Europe alike initially ignored the problem. The virus was seen as something far away, that similar to SARS and the avian flu, would be active mostly in the high-density populations of Asia and then go away. Even when Italy was shaken with a virulent COVID-19 outbreak in February [5], which closed down the northern industrial heartland of Veneto, the U.S. authorities were still mostly ignoring the problem [6]. Only when in mid-March, New York started seeing soaring infection rates did the population and the politicians start taking the disease seriously. This behavior is perfectly reflected in the Google search trend and the Twitter activity, motivating our research question: Is a state or political entity better capable of dealing with an infectious disease if the collective awareness is raised early on in the course of the disease? Does a population actively searching for information about COVID-19 and showing a robust dialog on Twitter about this topic deal more efficiently with the disease? In the earlier related research, it has been illustrated that data from online social media and Internet searches are correlated with several epidemics that have previously happened, such as seasonal influenza epidemics [7], Dengue [8], MERS [9] and H1N1 [10]. Regarding COVID-19, several works [11, 12, 13, 14] have demonstrated a significant correlation between the Internet search and the pandemic spreading among different countries. For instance, a Google Trends comparison with the number of infections in various countries was presented in [11], where it was found that initially the correlation between searches and infection rates in these countries was high with a lag of 0 to 12 days but decreased while the infection rate was still going up once the initial public interest in COVID-19 was tampering off. In [12], the authors compared the social media posts and search trends in China with the infection rate, albeit only until 11 February 2020. Although a correlation was found, its representativity is limited, as the period of the analysis was very short and restricted to China. Study [13] finds for 21 countries, the more citizens of a country search for \"hand washing,\" the lower is the infection rate. However, this is also a very short study, only covering the period from 19 January to 18 February 2020, and thus of restricted generalizability. In [14], it was found that searching for \"loss of smell\" from 1 December 2019 to 25 March 2020 in Italy, Spain, UK, U.S., Germany, France, Iran and the Netherlands directly correlated with the infection rate in these countries. While these studies demonstrate the initial predictive power of search trends and social media posting for predicting the infection rate, they are all restricted by the relatively short observation period during the onset of the pandemic, as well as the limited comparability of the observed geographies. Therefore, it still remains unclear what regional factors the Internet's predictive abilities may relate to and whether they are useful at surveilling the spread of the disease.