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. 2020 Sep 10;10(9):e040487.
doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2020-040487.

COVID-19 prevention and treatment information on the internet: a systematic analysis and quality assessment

Ka Siu Fan #  1 , Shahi Abdul Ghani #  1 , Nikolaos Machairas  2 , Lorenzo Lenti  1 , Ka Hay Fan  3 , Daniel Richardson  1 , Aneya Scott  1 , Dimitri Aristotle Raptis  4
Affiliations

COVID-19 prevention and treatment information on the internet: a systematic analysis and quality assessment

Ka Siu Fan et al. BMJ Open. .

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the quality of information regarding the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 available to the general public from all countries.

Design: Systematic analysis using the 'Ensuring Quality Information for Patients' (EQIP) Tool (score 0-36), Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark (score 0-4) and the DISCERN Tool (score 16-80) to analyse websites containing information targeted at the general public.

Data sources: Twelve popular search terms, including 'Coronavirus', 'COVID-19 19', 'Wuhan virus', 'How to treat coronavirus' and 'COVID-19 19 Prevention' were identified by 'Google AdWords' and 'Google Trends'. Unique links from the first 10 pages for each search term were identified and evaluated on its quality of information.

Eligibility criteria for selecting studies: All websites written in the English language, and provides information on prevention or treatment of COVID-19 intended for the general public were considered eligible. Any websites intended for professionals, or specific isolated populations, such as students from one particular school, were excluded, as well as websites with only video content, marketing content, daily caseload update or news dashboard pages with no health information.

Results: Of the 1275 identified websites, 321 (25%) were eligible for analysis. The overall EQIP, JAMA and DISCERN scores were 17.8, 2.7 and 38.0, respectively. Websites originated from 34 countries, with the majority from the USA (55%). News Services (50%) and Government/Health Departments (27%) were the most common sources of information and their information quality varied significantly. Majority of websites discuss prevention alone despite popular search trends of COVID-19 treatment. Websites discussing both prevention and treatment (n=73, 23%) score significantly higher across all tools (p<0.001).

Conclusion: This comprehensive assessment of online COVID-19 information using EQIP, JAMA and DISCERN Tools indicate that most websites were inadequate. This necessitates improvements in online resources to facilitate public health measures during the pandemic.

Keywords: health informatics; journalism (see medical journalism); world wide web technology.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Popular search terms used in COVID-19 and their relative popularity throughout the pandemic provided by Google Trends.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Workflow of web scraping and exclusion: initial 1275 websites returned were filtered for duplicates and assessed for eligibility to include 321 websites in the final dataset.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Country of origin of websites in descending order of the number of websites contributed.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Scores by top contributing countries (the USA, the UK, Canada and Australia) for EQIP Tool, JAMA benchmark and DISCERN Tool. EQIP, Ensuring Quality Information for Patients; JAMA, Journal of American Medical Association.
Figure 5
Figure 5
High-score distribution of the final dataset compared against low-scoring websites for EQIP Tool, JAMA benchmark and DISCERN Tool. EQIP, Ensuring Quality Information for Patients; JAMA, Journal of American Medical Association.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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