JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In the event of a population-wide infectious disease outbreak, such as the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), people's online activities could have a large impact on the public's concern and health behavior due to difficulty in accessing hospitals, which in turn causes people to seek necessary information on the web. Therefore, measuring and analyzing online health communication and public sentiment is essential for establishing effective and efficient disease control policies, especially in the early stage of the outbreak.

Objective:

This study aims to investigate the trends of online health communication, analyze the focus of people’s anxiety in the early stages of COVID-19, and evaluate the appropriateness of online information.

Methods:

From NAVER, which the most popular Korean web portal, 13,148 questions and 29,040 answers related to COVID-19 from 01/20/2020 to 03/02/2020 were collected. There are three main methods used in this study: 1) using the structural topic model, we looked at what topics existed in the online questions; 2) word network analysis was conducted to analyze the focus of people’s anxiety and worry in the questions; and 3) two medical doctors assessed the appropriateness of the answers to the questions, which are primarily related to people’s anxiety.

Results:

Fifty topics and six cohesive topic communities were identified from the question. Among them, topic community No. 4 (suspecting COVID-19 infection after developing a particular symptom) accounts for the largest portion of the questions. As the number of confirmed patients increases, the proportion of questions associated with topic community No. 4 increases. In addition, the prolonged situation has led to a slight increase in the proportion of questions related to job issues. People's anxieties and worries were closely related with physical symptoms and methods of self-protection. While relatively appropriate for suspicion of physical symptoms, a high proportion of answers related to self-protection methods were assessed as misinformation or advertisements.

Conclusions:

Search activity for online information has increased regarding the COVID-19 outbreak. Many of the online questions were related to people’s anxieties and worries. A considerable portion of corresponding answers had false information or were advertisements. The study results could contribute reference information to various countries that need to monitor public anxiety and provide appropriate information in the early stage of an infectious disease outbreak, including COVID-19. Our research also contributes to developing methods for measuring public opinion and sentiment in an epidemic situation based on natural language data on the Internet.