Publications

カンファレンス (国内) 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)

2021.3.1

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 (外部サイト)