Young people are not blameworthy: the generation's awareness of COVID-19 and behavioral responses.

At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has been ongoing for more than a year, young people have been the subject of vigilant scrutiny and criticism regarding their active engagement in social activities. We posed the question of whether young people's response to COVID-19 was different from that of other generations and analyzed awareness and behavior to investigate this question. Specifically, we examined internet searches for information on COVID-19 and credit card consumption in South Korea among young people in their 20s and compared them to a reference group of people in their 50s. Our research has confirmed that there was no statistically significant difference between young people and the reference group in this regard. Furthermore, in the 25 sub-sectors of industry we examined, young people's consumption activities recovered significantly faster than the reference group in only three sub-sectors. This study demonstrated that young people showed stronger interest than the reference group in their response to COVID-19, and that they cooperated with the government's social distancing policy by reducing their activities. Through this study, we presented a scientific approach for evaluating young people in regard to their response to COVID-19, offering useful implications for designing appropriate policies for public health.

The impact of the pandemic declaration on public awareness and behavior: Focusing on COVID-19 google searches.

The unprecedented outbreaks of epidemics such as the coronavirus has caused major socio-economic changes. To analyze public risk awareness and behavior in response to the outbreak of epidemic diseases, this study focuses on RSV (Relative Search Volume) provided by Google Trends. This study uses the social big data provided by Google RSV to investigate how the WHO's pandemic declaration affected public awareness and behavior. 37 OECD countries were analyzed and clustered according to the degree of reaction to the declaration, and the United States, France and Germany were selected for comparative study. The results of this study statistically confirmed that the pandemic declaration increased public awareness and had the effect of increasing searches for information on COVID-19 by more than 20%. In addition, this rapid rise in RSV also reflected interest in the COVID-19 test and had the effect of inducing individuals to be tested, which helped identify new cases. The significance of this study is that it provided the theoretical foundation for using RSV and its implications to understand and strategically utilize public awareness and behavior in situations where the WHO and governments must launch policies in response to the outbreak of new infectious diseases such as COVID-19.