Perception of emergent epidemic of COVID-2019 / SARS CoV-2 on the Polish Internet

Andrzej Jarynowski; Monika Wojta-Kempa; Vitaly Belik

In order to prepare and manage the crisis in an optimal way, a deeper perception analysis in the form of reliable quantitative and qualitative analysis is required. Especially, according to the results of empirical research, society expects institutional activities and in the event of an epidemic, it is the "state (...) that is responsible for the poor health of the population" (Taranowicz [54] ). Perhaps one of the reasons the Chinese have been so successful in controlling the spread of the infection is that social media like WeChat (Wang et al. [55] , Zhang et al. [56] ), or Internet forums (Liu and Lu [57] ) were analyzed by algorithms (Lu et al. [58] , Paul and Dredze [59] , Salathe et al. [60] ) with a goal to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Combining the behavioral changes detected via social media analysis with the detailed information on human mobility via e.g. mobile phone tracking (Schneider et al. [61] , Brockmann et al. [62] , Gonzalez et al. [63] ), sophisticated computational models of infectious disease spread could be implemented (Belik et al. [64] , Vespignani [65] , Maier and Brockmann [66] , Hufnagel et al. [67] , Ferguson et al. [68] , Prasse et al. [69] ) allowing to simulate various scenarios and assess possible human and economic losses and properly distribute the available resources. Furthermore, impact of public information campaigns could be measured by internal surveys of public opinion. In addition, Internet media analysis could fill gaps in socio-medical research on collective actions during an important public health disruption event such as infectious diseases (Jarynowski and Belik [70] ).