Public Emotional and Coping Responses to the COVID-19 Infodemic: A Review and Recommendations

Abstract

Since its onset in early 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has adversely affected not only the physical but also the mental health of people worldwide. Healthcare professionals and laypersons have sought to learn more about this novel and highly transmissible disease to better understand its etiology, treatment, and prevention. However, information overload and misinformation related to COVID-19 have elicited considerable public anxiety and created additional health threats. Collectively, these problems have been recognized by the World Health Organization as an “infodemic.” This review provides an overview of the global challenges posed by the COVID-19 infodemic, and used the psychological entropy model as a guiding framework to explicate the potential causes of the infodemic and identify potential solutions to mitigate impacts on public health. We first examine the role of anxiety in information processing and then delineate the adverse impacts of the infodemic. Finally, we propose strategies to combat the infodemic at the public, community, and individual levels.

Cross-Verification of COVID-19 Information Obtained From Unofficial Social Media Accounts and Associated Changes in Health Behaviors: Web-Based Questionnaire Study Among Chinese Netizens

“…Digital health or eHealth literacy can improve netizens’ capacity to search, compare, and take the best advantage of web-based information [ 73 ]. The government should establish programs to improve netizens’ eHealth literacy and strengthen their capacities to obtain, read, understand, and assess health care information so that they can use web-based COVID-19 information appropriately [ 74 ]. Moreover, natural language processing models and artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches, including AI-augmented lifelong learning and AI-assisted translation, simplification, summarization, and filtering, may have the general advantages of building and enhancing netizens’ levels of digital or eHealth literacy [ 75 , 76 ].…”

Mass Media Use to Learn About COVID-19 and the Non-intention to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19 in Latin America and Caribbean Countries

“…The COVID-19 pandemic is a scenario of health challenges due to the so-called infodemic ( 27 ), and therefore, it is important that accessible information on health issues is reliable ( 28 ). Some studies indicate that mass media news and information could be an important source of both information and disinformation about COVID-19.…”

Infodemic Challenges During COVID-19 Pandemic and the Strategies to Deal with Them: A Review Article

“…Active and effective presence of health professionals in social networks (20) Advise and emphasize to health care professionals about the sensitivity of the credibility of information resources (21) An accurate and complete investigation of suspicious sources by experts (21) Proper and timely informing health care providers about the latest recommendations and research ( 22)…”

“…According to the results of other studies, social risks were another challenge posed by infodemic in the COVID-19 pandemic. Exposure of people to a large amount of contradictory information about COVID-19 and easy access to the sources, especially at the initial stages of the pandemic, led to the generation of anxiety among people (18,21). This resulted in the generation of global waves of pre-epidemic panic due to misinformation (8), an increase in the rates of anxiety and sleep disturbance at the initial stages of the pandemic (42), the development of various myths about COVID-19 (25), distrust of governments and experts (37) and the public's distrust in the media (43,44).…”