Analysis of public information demand during the COVID-19 pandemic based on four-stage crisis model

Abstract

At the end of 2019, the outbreak of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a grave global public health emergency. At that time, there was a lack of information about this virus. Nowadays, social media has become the main source for the public to obtain information, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, in order to know about the public of information demand after the outbreak, the research collects the data of hot search on Sina-microblog from 1 January 2020 to 30 December 2020, and then conducts data mining by combining text processing with topic models. Then we show the topics mined in the knowledge map. The results show that with the outbreak of the COVID-19, people’s attention to the topics related to the epidemic reaches the maximum in a short time, and then decreases with fluctuation, but does not disappear immediately. Some topics fluctuate violently due to the emergence of special events. The results conformed to the four-stage crisis model in the emergency management. We analyze the role of social media in four stages for this. The findings of this study could help the government and emergency agencies to better understand the main aspects, which the public’s concern about COVID-19, and accelerate public opinion guidance and emotional reassurance.