Ask HN: How to disambiguate coronavirus impact search from interest search?

An updated Google Flu Trends (GFT) would face a number of challenges around tracking and predicting coronavirus distribution.

The global media coverage of the topic clearly drives numerous searches and social updates by perfectly healthy people, so how to identify the smaller subset of interest activity made by those actually impacted by the virus at close hand?

I realise GFT as it was faced a number of difficulties - including the notion of news skewing search - and this current scenario seems both more complex yet perhaps more important to navigate possible advanced warnings.

Any suggested approaches for search, social or other analysis?