Guest Lecture Infodemiology

Question 1

What is an infodemic?

Answer 1

Too much info (includes false info) in media (physical and digital) during a disease outbreak

Question 2

What is Misinformation?

Answer 2

False info, but not created with intent to cause harm.

Question 3

What is Disinformation?

Answer 3

Info that is false but with intent to cause deliberate harm to person, social group, organization or country.

Question 4

What is infodemiology?

Answer 4

Science of distribution and determinants of info in an electronic medium (internet specifically) or in a population with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy.

Question 5

What is the Curve order?

Answer 5

Prepare/monitor, detect, intervene, strengthen

Question 6

How to manage an epidemic?

Answer 6

Surveillance, virus, disease, interventions

Question 7

How to manage an infodemic?

Answer 7

Listening, narratives, distrust, interventions

Question 8

What is Infoveillance?

Answer 8

Using infodemiolgy data for surveillance purposes has been called “Infoveillance”.

Question 9

Digital Public Health Surviellance uses data in digital formats that are…?

Answer 9

• Publically available
• User generated
• Not captured by traditional surviellance methods

Question 10

What are examples of data sources?

Answer 10

• Social media (twitter, facebook)
• Blogs and forums (eg. reddit)
• content sharing websites (YouTube)
• internet seach engines
• new outlets on the internet
• other websites

Question 11

What is Infovigil?

Answer 11

• Open source infodemiology system develeoped by Consumer Health and Public Health Informatics Lab in Toronto
• Toolkit and “dashboard” for researches and public health officals
• Focus on twitter streams

Question 12

What were the findings from the Infovigil?

Answer 12

• Surveying public attitudes
• Identifying infodemics
• Assessing mental health
• detecting or predicting COVID cases
• Analyzing gov responses to pandemic
• evaluating quality of health info in prevention educational videos
• Twitter is leading social media platform, followed by Sina Weiloo
• Few studies included machine learning methods
• No studies documenting real time surveillance developped with social media data on COVID

Question 13

What were the overall findings of Infovigil?

Answer 13

• Daily sentiment (compound) scores varied greatly between positive and negative emotions for each topic
• Positive sentiments abt holiday wishes and support for healthcare workers and each other
• Neg sentiments abt frustrations and blame on political leaders.