Weibo Surveillance of Public Awareness to Ebola Disaster in China

Abstract

We argue that social media provides a new platform to explore how public responds to disasters and, in particular, disasters related to emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola. A critical aspect to early detection and effective containment of communicable diseases lies at the heart of how we leverage different types of social media to promote public awareness and safety protocol for the general population as well as the health workforce for dealing with emerging communicable diseases in a timely manner. China consists of more than 100 cities with a population of over one million people each. Effective monitoring and public awareness of global epidemics and early detection to its possible transmission to local population is critical for China for monitoring the spread of communicable disease, which can potentially have deadly effect for the Chinese population and the world. The recent West African Ebola disaster deserves attention due to the number of annual arrivals from Africa and also significantly large Chinese employees engaged in African cooperative projects. Weibo, the most popular social media in China with more than 2 billion users and over 300 million daily posts can essentially serve as a platform monitoring, promoting of public health awareness as well as early detection of possible cases of Ebola. This, in turn, can provide an effective and timely alternative to improve the overall preparedness for and response to disaster medicine. This study presents a timely and important investigation of Chinese public reaction to the Ebola disaster by analyzing related data from Weibo.