This study investigates the possible association between social media usage and the mental health toll from the coronavirus at the peak of Wuhan's COVID-19 outbreak. Informed by the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication Model and Health Belief Model, it proposes a conceptual model to study how people in Wuhan – the first epicenter of the global COVID-19 pandemic – used social media and its effects on users' mental health conditions and health behavior change. The results show that social media usage was related to both depression and secondary trauma, which also predicted health behavior change. But no relation was detected between health behavior change and mental health conditions. As the virus struck, social media usage was rewarding to Wuhan people who gained informational, emotional, and peer support from the health information shared on social media. An excessive use of social media, however, led to mental health issues. The results imply that taking a social media break may promote well-being during the pandemic, which is crucial to mitigating mental health harm inflicted by the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has continued to result in severe disruptions to food supply chains. In this research, we present a simulation study on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food supply chains and their sustainability using the lobster industry in Nova Scotia, Canada, as an example. The main contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it analyzes how the pandemic has negatively disrupted lobster supply chains and their sustainability. Second, it demonstrates how a simulation-based methodology based on the software AnyLogistix can be applied to examine the effects of a pandemic on food supply chains. We show the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic from four perspectives: production-inventory dynamics, customer performance, financial performance, and lead-time performance. Our findings include the following. First, the pandemic has created a backlog problem for the live lobster industry. Second, it has significantly increased the lead time of the lobster supply chain. Overall, this research can help the government and trade organizations to devise appropriate policies to reduce the negative impacts of the pandemic on food supply chains and their sustainability.

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