Dissonance between posts of health agencies and public comments regarding COVID-19 and vaccination on Facebook in Northern California.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have prompted a need for health agencies to improve their disease preparedness strategies, informing their communities of new information and promoting preventive behaviors to help curb the spread of the virus.

Methods

We ran unsupervised machine learning and emotion analysis, validated with manual coding, on posts of health agencies (N = 1588) and their associated public comments (N = 7813) during a crucial initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2020 to February 2021) among nine different counties with a higher proportion of vaccine-hesitant communities in Northern California. In addition, we explored differences in concerns and expressed emotions by two key group-level factors, county-level COVID-19

SUBMITTER: Calabrese C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11441105 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature