Limited Early Warnings and Public Attention to Coronavirus Disease 2019 in China, January-February, 2020: A Longitudinal Cohort of Randomly Sampled Weibo Users.

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

SUBMITTER: Zhu Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7171227 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature