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

Abstract

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.

The production and distribution of face masks to other countries: a strategic approach of Taiwan during COVID-19 outbreak

“…This gives us a predictive ability we did not have before because the developments typically happened after the official announcement of the face mask policy update meaning that people are afraid of running out of supplies when official public health policy is distributed, causing citizens to be afraid of losing out. Source and medium were also investigated, indicating that in times of crisis, people rely on official websites, search engines and social media for information (Lai et al , 2020). There are five responsible factors majorly of the mask production of Taiwan such as safety, price, production, distribution and work environment that made a mark and created history with a left arc on the world stage.…”

“…Taiwan had just 440 cases and seven deaths as of May 18 (Huang, 2020). According to the status report maintained by the WHO, Taiwan has recognized a relatively low number of confirmed COVID-19 cases (Lai et al , 2020). Taiwan has been identified as one of the most successful countries in the fight against the virus (Kuo, 2021).…”

3D Augmented Reality Marker-based Mobile Apps Design of Face Mask Layer

“…Following that, a lack of exposure to the current technological environment causes the presentation to be dull for learning concepts [21]. Finally, society lacks understanding regarding the usage of protective face masks, which leads some people to be infected with the virus [22]. Thus, employing AR to provide the particular information for the protective face mask would provide users with an intriguing manner to learn.…”