Daily trend data related to specific search terms were acquired from Google Trends, Baidu Index, and Sina Weibo Index by setting the time parameter to ‘2 January to 12 February 2020’ and the location parameter to ‘China’. We chose a period 2 weeks earlier than for the molecular diagnosis data for COVID-2019. Two keywords, ‘coronavirus’ and ‘pneumonia’, were used in Google Trends. The respective Chinese terms, ‘冠状病毒‘ and ‘肺炎’ were used in Baidu Index, the most popular web search engine in China, and Sina Weibo Index, a social media platform widely used in China. The peak number of search queries in Baidu was 682,888 for ‘coronavirus’ and 760,460 for ‘pneumonia’, both on 25 January 2020. The peak number of posts on Sina Weibo was 26,297,746 for ‘coronavirus’ and 30,704,753 for ‘pneumonia’, both on 21 January 2020. Google Trends does not provide the raw number of search queries but the number normalised to the peak number. The peaks for both keywords on Google Trends were reached on 25 January 2020.