School of Design, Hunan University, Changsha, China.
Emergency Science Joint Research Center, Hunan University, Changsha, China.
J Med Internet Res. 2021 Aug 12;23(8):e29150. doi: 10.2196/29150.
The COVID-19 outbreak has induced negative emotions among people. These emotions are expressed by the public on social media and are rapidly spread across the internet, which could cause high levels of panic among the public. Understanding the changes in public sentiment on social media during the pandemic can provide valuable information for developing appropriate policies to reduce the negative impact of the pandemic on the public. Previous studies have consistently shown that the COVID-19 outbreak has had a devastating negative impact on public sentiment. However, it remains unclear whether there has been a variation in the public sentiment during the recovery phase of the pandemic.
In this study, we aim to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China by continuously tracking public sentiment on social media throughout 2020.
We collected 64,723,242 posts from Sina Weibo, China's largest social media platform, and conducted a sentiment analysis based on natural language processing to analyze the emotions reflected in these posts.
We found that the COVID-19 pandemic not only affected public sentiment on social media during the initial outbreak but also induced long-term negative effects even in the recovery period. These long-term negative effects were no longer correlated with the number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases both locally and nationwide during the recovery period, and they were not attributed to the postpandemic economic recession.
The COVID-19 pandemic induced long-term negative effects on public sentiment in mainland China even as the country recovered from the pandemic. Our study findings remind public health and government administrators of the need to pay attention to public mental health even once the pandemic has concluded.
新冠疫情的爆发引发了人们的负面情绪。这些情绪在社交媒体上被公众表达出来，并迅速在互联网上传播，可能会引起公众的高度恐慌。了解疫情期间社交媒体上公众情绪的变化，可以为制定适当的政策提供有价值的信息，以减轻疫情对公众的负面影响。先前的研究一致表明，新冠疫情对公众情绪产生了毁灭性的负面影响。然而，目前尚不清楚在疫情的恢复阶段公众情绪是否存在变化。
本研究旨在通过在 2020 年期间持续跟踪社交媒体上的公众情绪，来确定新冠疫情对中国大陆的影响。
我们从中国最大的社交媒体平台新浪微博上收集了 64723242 条帖子，并通过自然语言处理进行了情感分析，以分析这些帖子中反映的情绪。
我们发现，新冠疫情不仅在疫情初期影响了社交媒体上的公众情绪，而且在恢复期间还产生了长期的负面影响。这些长期的负面影响与恢复期间本地和全国新确诊的新冠病例数量不再相关，也与疫情后的经济衰退无关。
即使中国大陆从疫情中恢复过来，新冠疫情也对公众情绪产生了长期的负面影响。我们的研究结果提醒公共卫生和政府管理人员，即使疫情结束后，也需要关注公众的心理健康。
