Publications
CONFERENCE (DOMESTIC) Public Concern About COVID-19 Through Search Queries
Zhiwei GAO (NAIST), Kongmeng LIEW (NAIST), Taichi MURAYAMA (NAIST), Shuntaro YADA (NAIST), Shoko WAKAMIYA (NAIST), Eiji ARAMAKI (NAIST), Nobuyuki SHIMIZU, Sumio FUJITA
第13回データ工学と情報マネジメントに関するフォーラム (DEIM 2021)
March 01, 2021
COVID-19 has uprooted lives and livelihood, causing widespread panic across communities and societies. Emerging reports suggest that people living in rural areas are more susceptible to COVID-19 in some countries. However, there is a lack of quantitative evidence that can shed light on whether residents from rural areas are more concerned about COVID-19 than residents from urban areas. One way to address this issue is via examining online search queries to analyze changes in concern towards COVID-19. Therefore, this study investigated the attitudes toward COVID-19 from different Japanese prefectures by aggregating and analyzing Yahoo Japan search queries. We quantitatively define COVID-19 concern (Localized Concern Index and Excessive Localized Concern Index). Our results demonstrate that the concern indices are able to measure concern about COVID-19 in rural and urban areas, and there are regional differences in these concerns.
Paper : Public Concern About COVID-19 Through Search Queries (external link)