Social support and connective affordances: Examining responses to early Covid-19 patient support seeking on microblogs

Focusing on the new Super-Topics Platform (STP) of Weibo, this study examined microblog users' responses to the support seeking of early Covid-19 patients suffering the first outbreak in China. A total of 853 patients' support-seeking messages, along with 81,000 comments to 270 patients' help-requests, were crawled and analyzed. Results showed that content characteristics influenced endorsing, sharing, and commenting by users. Furthermore, the study identified three types of social support present in Weibo viewers' comments: emotional, informational, and diffusional supports. These social support types were inherently linked to the connective affordances, which are more inclusive than paralinguistic digital affordances, of microblogs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Enhance antibiotic resistance and human health risks in aerosols during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aerosols are an important route for the transmission of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Since the 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the large-scale use of disinfectants has effectively prevented the spread of environmental microorganisms, but studies regarding the antibiotic resistance of airborne bacteria remain limited. This study focused on four functional urban areas (commercial areas, educational areas, residential areas and wastewater treatment plant) to study the variations in ARG abundances, bacterial community structures and risks to human health during the COVID-19 pandemic in aerosol. The results indicated the abundance of ARGs during the COVID-19 period were up to approximately 13-fold greater than before the COVID-19 period. Large-scale disinfection resulted in a decrease in total bacterial abundance. However, chlorine-resistant bacteria tended to be survived. Among the four functional areas, the diversity and abundance of aerosol bacteria were highest in commercial aera. Antibiotic susceptibility assays suggested elevated resistance of isolated bacteria to several tested antibiotics due to disinfection exposure. The potential exposure risks of ARGs to human health were 2 times higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, and respiratory intake was the main exposure route. The results highlighted the elevated antibiotic resistance of bacteria in aerosols that were exposed to disinfectants after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study provides theoretical guidance for the rational use of disinfectants and control of antimicrobial resistance.

COVID-19 Vaccines on TikTok: A Big-Data Analysis of Entangled Discourses.

Focusing on social media affordances and China's social/political context, the present study analyzed the digital communication practices about COVID-19 vaccines on a popular social media platform-TikTok-which is called DouYin in China. Overall, this study identified five major forces partaking in constructing the discourses, with government agencies and state media being the dominant contributors. Furthermore, video posters demonstrated different patterns of utilizing social media affordances (e.g., hashtags) in disseminating their messages. The top hashtags adopted by state media were more representative of international relations and Taiwan; those by government agencies were of updates on pandemic outbreaks; those by individual accounts were of mainstream values and health education; those by commercial media were of celebrities and health education; those by enterprise accounts were of TikTok built-in marketing hashtags. The posted videos elicited both cognitive and affective feedback from online viewers. Implications of the findings were discussed in the context of health communication and global recovery against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and Chinese culture.

Ingroup identification moderates blame attributions for the COVID‐19 crisis, and willingness to help ingroup and outgroup members

The present studies focussed on how blame attributions for an existing problem and decisions to help those negatively impacted by it are affected by group membership and social identity considerations. This was investigated in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, asking British nationals about their attributions regarding the pandemic in terms of culpability of the British national ingroup and the Chinese, a national outgroup to the participants. Willingness to help those negatively impacted by the pandemic was also assessed, separately for help offered to ingroup and outgroup members. It was hypothesized that blame attributions and helping decisions would be driven by identity concerns, such that outgroup blame would be stronger than ingroup blame, that ingroup help would be offered more willingly than outgroup help, and that these effects would be especially pronounced for those strongly identified with their national ingroup. Support for the predictions were found in an exploratory online survey of British nationals (N = 250), and in a preregistered second study (N = 250). Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Analyses of Social Issues & Public Policy is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Psychological and behavioural responses to COVID-19: a China-Britain comparison.

INTRODUCTION: Despite the burgeoning literature on COVID-19, there has been little cross-national work on the correlates of mental health or its association with pandemic behaviours. We considered psychological distress, quarantine status, social distancing and self-medication in China and the UK. METHODS: We conducted online surveys in China (N=1135) and the UK (N=1293), beginning in March 2020. Participants indicated demographics, whether they were in quarantine, relationship status, social distancing, use of vitamins/traditional medicines and completed the K6 scale of psychological distress. RESULTS: 19.1% of the respondents in China were at risk of severe mental illness (SMI: 95% CI 16.9% to 21.6%) and 16.6% (95% CI 14.6% to 18.8%) in the UK. Risk of SMI was among those in quarantine (OR 11.18 (95% CI 4.08 to 30.62); p=0.001) and in younger respondents (OR 2.61 (95% CI 1.01 to 6.79); p=0.048) although the latter effect was significant only in the UK. Risk of SMI was positively associated with self-medication (ßs=0.17, p=0.001) and negatively with social distancing in China (country×SMI ß=0.51, p=0.001), with further interactions for age and sex (social distancing), age, marital status and quarantine (self-medication). DISCUSSION: Across the countries, quarantine was associated with poorer mental health, while greater psychological distress was associated with greater self-medication rate. Future work should explore further cross-national variations in psychological health and behaviours during pandemics.