Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 8, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: May 7, 2020 - May 18, 2020
Date Accepted: Jun 4, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 6, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Nature and Diffusion of COVID-19-related Oral Health Information on Chinese Social Media: An Analysis of Tweets on Weibo
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media has become increasingly important as a source of information for the public and is widely utilized for health-related information. The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has exerted a negative impact on dental practices.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to analyze the nature and diffusion of COVID-19-related oral health information on Chinese social media Weibo.
Methods:
A total of 15,900 tweets related to oral health/dentistry information from Weibo during COVID-19 outbreak in China (31st December 2019 - 16th March 2020) were included in our study. The included tweets were analyzed over time and geographic region, and coded into 8 thematic categories. Additionally, the time distributions of tweets containing information about dental services, needs of dental treatment and home oral care during COVID-19 epidemic were further analyzed.
Results:
People reacted rapidly to the emerging SARS-CoV-2 threat to dental services and a large amount of COVID-19-related oral health information were tweeted on Weibo. The time and geographic distribution of tweets shared similarities with epidemiological data of COVID-19 outbreak in China. Tweets containing home oral care and dental services contents were the most frequently exchanged information. The distributions of tweets containing information about dental services, needs of dental treatment and home oral care information dynamically changed with time.
Conclusions:
Our study overviewed and analyzed social media data about the supply and demand of dental services during COVID-19 epidemic, thus providing insights for the government organization, media and dental professionals to better facilitate oral health communication and efficiently shape public concern through social media when routine dental services are unavailable during an unprecedented event. The study of nature and distribution of social media can serve as a useful adjunct tool to help make public health policies.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.