Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 6, 2020
Date Accepted: Jul 23, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jul 23, 2020
Cross-country comparison of public awareness, rumours, and behavioural responses to the COVID-19 epidemic: An internet surveillance study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Understanding the public’s behavioural response to COVID-19 and accompanied infodemic is crucial to control an epidemic.
Objective:
To assess real-time public awareness and behavioural responses to the COVID-19 epidemic across countries.
Methods:
Internet surveillance was used to collect real-time data from the general public to assess public awareness and rumours (China: Baidu; Worldwide: Google Trends) and behaviour response (China: Ali; Worldwide: Google Shopping). These indices measured the daily number of searching or purchasing, and were compared with daily COVID-19 cases. The trend comparisons across countries were observed from December 2019 (pre-pandemic baseline) to 11 April 2020 (when the lockdown lifted in Wuhan, China).
Results:
We identified the squandered windows of opportunity for early epidemic control in 12 countries, when public awareness was very low despite the emerging epidemic. China's epidemic and PHEIC did not prompt a worldwide public reaction to adopt public health protective measures; instead, most only responded to the epidemic after case counts mounted in their own country/region. Rumours and misinformation led to a surge of sales in herbal remedies in China and antimalarial drugs worldwide, and timely clarification of rumours mitigated the rush to buy unproven remedies.
Conclusions:
Our comparative study highlighted the urgency of international coordination to promote mutual learning on epidemic characteristics as well as effective control measures, and to trigger early and timely response in individual countries. The early release of official guidelines and timely clarification of rumours led by government are necessary to guide the public to take rational actions.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.