Spatial evolution patterns of public panic on Chinese social networks amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Novel coronavirus pneumonia has had a significant impact on people's lives and psychological health. We developed a stage model to analyse the spatial and temporal distribution of public panic during the two waves of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We used tweets with geographic location data from the popular hashtag ‘Lockdown Diary’ recorded from 23 January to April 8, 2020, and ‘Nanjing Outbreak’ recorded from 21 July to 1 September 2021 on Weibo. Combining the lexicon-based sentiment analysis and the grounded theory approach, this panic model could explain people's panic and behavioural responses in different areas at different stages of the pandemic. Next, we used the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model to reconfirm the panic model. The results showed that public sentiments fluctuated strongly in the early stages; in this case, panic and prayers were the dominant sentiments. In terms of spatial distribution, public panic showed hierarchical and neighbourhood diffusion, with highly assertive expressions of sentiment at the outbreak sites, economically developed areas, and areas surrounding the outbreak. Most importantly, we considered that public panic was affected by the 17 specific topics extracted based on the perceived and actual distance of the pandemic, thus stimulating the process of panic from minimal, acute, and mild panic to perceived rationality. Consequently, the public's behavioural responses shifted from delayed, negative, and positive, to rational behavioural responses. This study presents a novel approach to explore public panic from both a time and space perspective and provides some suggestions in response to future pandemics.

Public Social Media Discussions on Agricultural Product Safety Incidents: Chinese African Swine Fever Debate on Weibo

“…Over time, the negative emotions in all three user groups had a downward trend, which was similar to the research results in previous studies ( Liu et al, 2022 ; Yang et al, 2022 ). With the implementation of prevention and control measures and the popularization of knowledge related to the epidemic, people’s fear was also being alleviated.…”

Spatiotemporal disparities in regional public risk perception of COVID-19 using Bayesian Spatiotemporally Varying Coefficients (STVC) series models across Chinese cities

“…Even after adjusting provincial time-varying impacts, the city-specific effects accounted for 58.6% of regional public risk perception variations. Reference to public information only at the national or provincial level may lead to uncertainties or unsuccessful pandemic prevention policies [ 15 ]. For all these reasons, we recommend a multi-level response system for major emergencies, such as cities with a high level of irregular heterogeneity being considered separately, whereas most cities with uniform or clustered patterns can be controlled through provincial or national measures to reduce the social and financial burdens posed on the public.…”

“…Lastly, to overcome the limitations of this study, future studies could improve the understanding of how regional public attention and risk perception interact with NPIs, vaccines, and other emerging strategies in containing COVID-19. First, the public health crisis may arouse a positive public response to NPIs and disruptive emotions against those strategies [ 15 ]. In this study, we did not separate these different attitudes toward COVID-19 due to the original limitations embedded in the internet search engine data.…”

“…As more information has been released through social media, the overall public responses to the pandemic largely supported the NPIs in China [ 42 , 84 ]. For future studies in countries where mixed public responses were previously identified, we suggest that social media complement the internet search engine data to investigate regional public responses and behaviors [ 15 , 17 , 85 ]. Second, this study mainly focused on the nationwide wave of the pandemic in China when the vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 were not available.…”

“…The collective human attention to COVID-19 can impact the effectiveness of regional NPIs in terms of the timing and implementation of prevention measures to further influence the actual progress of the pandemic [ 9 , 10 ]. The Internet has played a pivotal role during this unprecedented pandemic and serves as the predominant source for the general public to acquire news and other health- and disease-related information [ [13] , [14] , [15] , [16] ]. With the explosion of modern internet information, human attention to crucial information is of critical importance [ 17 ].…”