Pandemic Response and Crisis Informatics: An Imperative for Public Health Messaging

The focus of this research is to examine the usage patterns exhibited by users of online search engines in the midst of COVID-19. We aim to understand how the queries are structured and their timing on the various platforms that citizens are using to check the availability of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) since the outbreak of the COVID-19 public health crisis. Understanding and analyzing peak volume for information platforms is critical, especially for public health policy, with a mind toward crisis informatics. In this study, we collect all the data of users querying data from Face Mask Map (FMM), a real-time application which displays the inventory status for all stores selling PPE. This data is from the point at which the public health crisis became widely known to the time at which PPE availability saturated the market. As COVID-19 continues to proliferate and affect people around the globe, official organizations such as Department of Health and World Health Organization (WHO) utilize Web or Social Media (Facebook or Twitter) to announce up-to-date news, e.g. daily confirmed cases or in order to update policy regarding resource management. We then correlate the significant announcements from public health officials, specifically published by Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHW) in Taiwan, that are concerning usage and distribution of PPE. We find that the temporal dynamics of aggregated users behavior are consistent with the events. For the practitioner of disaster management, it is critical to be able to identify when the public will consistently react to public health announcements for the purpose of ensuring proper supply distribution and avoid misallocation. It is our hope that the study can help to build an effective online disaster preparedness information system, in the consideration of computing and public psychology, to better respond to disaster with a greater corpus of data.