Liu Yan, Zou Peng
School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2023 Jan 28;13(2):109. doi: 10.3390/bs13020109.
Community transmission events occasionally happened in the long-term pandemic, which led to repeated outbreaks of COVID-19. In addition to potential physical threats, the outbreaks could also lead to psychological stress and influence their health behaviors, especially for vulnerable people. It poses a great challenge to both physical and mental health management. However, little is known about the impacts of discrete outbreak events of COVID-19 on people's reactions to health concerns in the long-term pandemic period. In the current study, we discussed the impact of discrete outbreak events of COVID-19 on health information search for specific symptoms in China from a perceptive of susceptibility. The empirical study was conducted after the first wave of outbreak events ended in China from June to October 2020. Three typical outbreak events happened during this period, and a total of 1800 search index data for 60 cities in China crawled from Baidu search engine were included in the data set. Using the real-world searching data, we conducted a panel data analysis to examine the psychological effect of discrete outbreak events on the symptom search and the moderation effect of the geographical distance. It was found that discrete outbreak events significantly increased the symptom search, and its impacts were various in different regions. More health information search caused by discrete outbreak events was found in cities which were closer to the outbreak area. Implications for healthcare were discussed.
在长期的疫情大流行中，社区传播事件时有发生，导致新冠疫情反复爆发。除了潜在的身体威胁外，疫情爆发还可能导致心理压力，并影响人们的健康行为，尤其是对弱势群体而言。这对身心健康管理都构成了巨大挑战。然而，在长期的疫情大流行期间，关于新冠疫情的离散爆发事件对人们健康担忧反应的影响，我们所知甚少。在本研究中，我们从易感性的角度探讨了新冠疫情的离散爆发事件对中国特定症状健康信息搜索的影响。实证研究是在2020年6月至10月中国第一波疫情爆发事件结束后进行的。在此期间发生了三起典型的疫情爆发事件，数据集中包含了从百度搜索引擎抓取的中国60个城市的1800条搜索指数数据。利用实际搜索数据，我们进行了面板数据分析，以检验离散爆发事件对症状搜索的心理影响以及地理距离的调节作用。研究发现，离散爆发事件显著增加了症状搜索，且其影响在不同地区各不相同。在距离疫情爆发地区较近的城市，离散爆发事件引发了更多的健康信息搜索。文中还讨论了对医疗保健的启示。
