Public Emotional and Coping Responses to the COVID-19 Infodemic: A Review and Recommendations

Abstract

Since its onset in early 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has adversely affected not only the physical but also the mental health of people worldwide. Healthcare professionals and laypersons have sought to learn more about this novel and highly transmissible disease to better understand its etiology, treatment, and prevention. However, information overload and misinformation related to COVID-19 have elicited considerable public anxiety and created additional health threats. Collectively, these problems have been recognized by the World Health Organization as an "infodemic." This review provides an overview of the global challenges posed by the COVID-19 infodemic, and used the psychological entropy model as a guiding framework to explicate the potential causes of the infodemic and identify potential solutions to mitigate impacts on public health. We first examine the role of anxiety in information processing and then delineate the adverse impacts of the infodemic. Finally, we propose strategies to combat the infodemic at the public, community, and individual levels.

Keywords: anxiety; coronavirus; eHealth; fake news; false information; health literacy; misinformation; pandemic.