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Epidemic-related information and resources have proven to have a significant impact on the spread of the epidemic during the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The various orientation role of information has different effects on the epidemic spreading process, which will affect the individual' awareness of resources allocation and epidemic spreading scale. Based on this, a three-layer network is established to describe the dynamic coevolution process among information dissemination, resource allocation, and epidemic spreading. In order to analyze dynamic coevolution process, the microscopic Markov chain (MMC) theory is used. Then, the threshold of epidemic spreading is deduced. Our results indicated that the official information orientation intensity inhibits the epidemics spreading, while rumor orientation intensity promotes epidemic spreading. At the same time, the efficiency of resource utilization restrains the expansion of the infection scale. The two kinds of information are combined with resources respectively. Official information will enhance the inhibitory effect of resources epidemics spreading, while rumor will do the opposite.

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BACKGROUND: Communicating official public health information about infectious diseases is complicated by the fact that individuals receive much of their information from their social contacts, either via interpersonal interaction or social media, which can be prone to bias and misconception. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to evaluate the effect of public health campaigns and the effect of socially communicated health information on learning about diseases simultaneously. Although extant literature addresses the effect of one source of information (official or social) or the other, it has not addressed the simultaneous interaction of official information (OI) and social information (SI) in an experimental setting. METHODS: We used a series of experiments that exposed participants to both OI and structured SI about the symptoms and spread of hepatitis C over a series of 10 rounds of computer-based interactions. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a high, low, or control intensity of OI and to receive accurate or inaccurate SI about the disease. RESULTS: A total of 195 participants consented to participate in the study. Of these respondents, 186 had complete responses across all ten experimental rounds, which corresponds to a 4.6% (9/195) nonresponse rate. The OI high intensity treatment increases learning over the control condition for all symptom and contagion questions when individuals have lower levels of baseline knowledge (all P values ≤.04). The accurate SI condition increased learning across experimental rounds over the inaccurate condition (all P values ≤.01). We find limited evidence of an interaction between official and SI about infectious diseases. CONCLUSIONS: This project demonstrates that exposure to official public health information increases individuals' knowledge of the spread and symptoms of a disease. Socially shared information also facilitates the learning of accurate and inaccurate information, though to a lesser extent than exposure to OI. Although the effect of OI persists, preliminary results suggest that it can be degraded by persistent contradictory SI over time.

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The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) inspires various conspiracy theories, which could divert public attention, alter human behaviors, and consequently affect the spread of the pandemic. Here we estimate the relation of the online attention on COVID-19-related conspiracy theories to human mobility, as well as to the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases, during 14 March 2020 to 28 August 2020. We observe that the online attention to COVID-19 conspiracy theories is significantly and negatively related to human mobility, but its negative impact is noticeably less than those of the attention to official information and personal protection measures. Since human mobility significantly promotes the spread of COVID-19, the attention to official information and personal protection measures lowers COVID-19 cases by 16.16% and 9.41%, respectively, while attention to conspiracy theories only reduces the COVID-19 cases by 6.65%. In addition, we find that in the states with higher online attention to COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the negative relation of the attention to conspiracy theories is much weaker than that in states where there is less concern about conspiracies. This study stresses the necessity of restricting the online transmission of unfounded conspiracy theories during a pandemic.

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Objective: The study intends to identify gap in HIV/AIDS awareness dissemination between the official channel delivery and the needs of adolescents. Methods: We crawled all the HIV/AIDS queries from "Baidu zhidao" till June 11st, 2018. "Baidu zhidao" inquiry and information form official public service announcement (abbreviated for "official delivery" hereafter) were the data source for comparative analysis. We categorized the text data into four kinds, "prevention", "testing and treatment", "symptoms and infection" and "legalization and policies" according to official categorization. Word segmentation was used for text mining and word frequency statistics, as well word cloud was used for word frequency visualization (all based on a comparison after removing the useless words). Results: Of the official delivery, the proportion of prevention category accounted for 32.3% (n=162) (ranks 1st), and the proportion of legalization and policies category was 14.1% (n=71). While among the "Baidu zhidao" inquiry information, the proportion of testing and treatment category accounted for 51.7% (n=51 264), and the proportion of prevention category accounted for 11.4% (n=11 272). The frequencies of same terms/ repeated terms of two channels accounted for 60% (59.3%-63.9%) of each category among the official delivery, of which, the proportion of interest terms comparatively less and more diverse in "Baidu zhidao" inquiries. The proportion of the terms frequency of each category was about 45% in "prevention, testing and treatment", 34.3% (n=14 781) in "symptoms and infection" and 17.0% (n=5 744) in "legalization and policies", respectively. Conclusion: A big gap was identified between the available official source and inquiries' term, especially word frequency discrepancy between "legalization and policies" and "prevention" categories. It underscore the necessity for the official channel to address the needs and interests of adolescents in the future.

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