Limited Early Warnings and Public Attention to Coronavirus Disease 2019 in China, January-February, 2020: A Longitudinal Cohort of Randomly Sampled Weibo Users.
Disaster Med Public Health Prep
; 14(5): e24-e27, 2020 10.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1030570
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE:
Awareness and attentiveness have implications for the acceptance and adoption of disease prevention and control measures. Social media posts provide a record of the public's attention to an outbreak. To measure the attention of Chinese netizens to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a pre-established nationally representative cohort of Weibo users was searched for COVID-19-related key words in their posts.METHODS:
COVID-19-related posts (N = 1101) were retrieved from a longitudinal cohort of 52 268 randomly sampled Weibo accounts (December 31, 2019-February 12, 2020).RESULTS:
Attention to COVID-19 was limited prior to China openly acknowledging human-to-human transmission on January 20. Following this date, attention quickly increased and has remained high over time. Particularly high levels of social media traffic appeared around when Wuhan was first placed in quarantine (January 23-24, 8-9% of the overall posts), when a scandal associated with the Red Cross Society of China occurred (February 1, 8%), and, following the death of Dr Li Wenliang (February 6-7, 11%), one of the whistleblowers who was reprimanded by the Chinese police in early January for discussing this outbreak online.CONCLUSION:
Limited early warnings represent missed opportunities to engage citizens earlier in the outbreak. Governments should more proactively communicate early warnings to the public in a transparent manner.Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Social Media
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Cohort study
/
Experimental Studies
/
Observational study
/
Prognostic study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Limits:
Humans
Country/Region as subject:
Asia
Language:
English
Journal:
Disaster Med Public Health Prep
Journal subject:
Public Health
Year:
2020
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Dmp.2020.68
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