Assessing the Utility of Dear Pandemic for Public Health Professionals and Health Care Provider

Goochey, Rachel, Joseph J. Zilber School of Public Health, Mentor, Pagan Martinez, Ian Antonio, Poster Presentation, Project, Public Health, School and College, Simanek, Amanda, Student

Rachel Goochey and Ian Antonio Pagan Martinez, “Assessing the Utility of Dear Pandemic for Public Health Professionals and Health Care Provider”
Mentor: Amanda Simanek, Public Health
Poster #68

Dear Pandemic is a social media-based science communication effort aiming to 1) disseminate trustworthy, comprehensive, and timely scientific content about the pandemic to lay audiences, and 2) promote media and science literacy and information hygiene practices to equip readers to better manage the COVID-19 infodemic within their networks.  The objective of this study was to describe 1) topics covered in posts on the Dear Pandemic (DP) Facebook page and its sister Spanish-language page, Querida Pandemia (QP), and 2) organizations that shared posts from each page.  We designed a data abstraction form and database, and abstracted data on all posts shared on the DP Facebook page from February 2021-February 2022, and QP Facebook page from March 2020-July 2022, including post title, organizations with public pages that shared posts, and any qualitative messages included with shared content. Posts were classified by primary topic and organizations that shared posts by type. A total of 448 and 388 short essays were posted to DP and QP (respectively) over those periods. Most posts on DP were classified as having the primary topics of vaccines (N=102, 23%) and families/kids (N=76, 17%) and on QP as vaccines (N=92, 24%) and infection & spread (N=36, 9 %). A range of organizations with public pages shared DP and QP posts. Post topics with the highest mean number of shares by organizations with public pages on DP were masks (9.33 mean public page shares) and infection & spread (7.9 mean public page shares), whereas the highest mean number of shares by organizations with public pages on QP were COVID variants (2.28 mean shares) and long Covid (1.33 mean shares). Understanding of the utility of this science communication effort to public health professionals and health care providers can lend insight into best practices for addressing the COVID-19 infodemic.