ABSTRACT
Social media played a major role during the distress in the era of Web 3.0 technologies. The use of social media for relief and rescue operations is common nowadays. But the Web 3.0 and its technologies have made the situation worse sometimes, especially in the healthcare sector. The measles-rubella (MR) vaccine campaign in India had a huge setback due to the social media. The World Health Organization (WHO) has observed that the misinformation in social media is one of the ten reasons for vaccine hesitancy. In the COVID-19 situation, the misinformation has increased tremendously but at the same time people were expecting a vaccine. The vaccine hesitancy depends on the severity of the cause of the disease and the cure of the disease. There were trends of vaccination hesitancy during the MR vaccination campaign and that has changed to vaccine hope during the COVID-19 in the social media. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Background: Essential health services including immunization were significantly impacted due to COVID-19 with devastating outcomes in low-and middle-income countries (LMIC). The disruption in immunization services due to global pandemic and measures undertaken at regional levels to overcome need to be studied as pandemic preparedness strategy. Objective: To document the contextual narratives related to immunization services during the Covid-19 disease outbreak by interviewing qualified paediatricians in the field practice area of private tertiary care teaching medical college Methodology: In-depth phone-based interviews were conducted with paediatricians in diverse settings during November 2020 to March 2021. Reflexive thematic analysis was performed, major themes identi-fied, and case studies documented. Results: Paediatricians shared rich experiences related to immunization services impacted due to COVID-19 especially during the earlier months due to imposition of lockdowns leading to discontinua-tion, disruption of services, decrease in volume of immunizations, modest transition to telehealth service delivery, facility-level changes brought in to ensure immunization services and capacity building measures for upskilling. Conclusions: Contextual narratives revealed in this study provide rich narrative about the disruption of immunization services due to COVID-19. These findings need to be understood and leveraged to be future ready and prevent further disruptions by identifying and scaling up key solutions piloted in this study. © 2022, MedSci Publications. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: In India, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) reports that 8% of the COVID-19 cases were contributed by children less than 17 years which could be a sizable number considering our population size. In a resource-limited country like India, the immediate future doctors will be expected to play a crucial role as frontline health care workers against COVID-19. Objective: To assess the knowledge and perception of students with regard to paediatric COVID-19. Method: A descriptive cross-sectional study was done among medical students of Final year MBBS (Part I and II) and Interns/CRRIs (Compulsory Rotatory Residential Internship) from two medical colleges of Chennai. After obtaining ethical approval, data werecollected using a validated structured self-administered questionnaire through online Google forms and analysed using SPSS version21 software. Results: Of the 655 participants included in the study, 213 (32.5%) were Final MBBS Part I students, 278 (42.4%) final MBBS Part II students and 164 (25.1%) were CRRIs. Most participants (83.2%) had adequate knowledge. 68.7% agreed to work in paediatric fever clinics. Majority were confident about their competency in counseling parents of children (90.7%) and adequate PPE measures (86%). However, few participants (26.3%) felt they were competent to identify complications in children. Conclusion: With COVID-19 pandemic in its second year, the medical students have developed adequate knowledge of COVID-19 in paediatric patients and they can help the health workers in times of need. Copyright (c) 2022: Author(s).
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study is to assess the fear factor in Social media data in the context of Coronavirus Disease - 2019(COVID-19) across the globe. The fear generated from social media content will adversely affect the mental health of the public. Design/methodology/approach: The study is followed by a literature survey during the emergence of social media and Internet technologies since the year 2006 where the people commonly started to use the internet across the world. The Twitter data collected on COVID-19 during the infection period and the analysis. Findings: The social media contents adversely affect the mental health of the common public and also the healthcare programs run by the government organizations to some extent. The findings show that the social media are the major source of fear-mongering information and the people behind the fear-mongering are making use of the disaster situation to set their agenda. The strict enactment of law and the efforts by the social media platforms can reduce the fake news and misinformation. Research limitations/implications: The research focuses only on the Twitter data for the analysis during the COVID-19 distress. The detailed study needs to be done in similar distress situations across the globe. The data retrieval became limited from different social media platforms because of privacy issues. © 2020, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.