The association between Japanese-language videos on YouTube regarding COVID-19 and Internet searches in Japan. (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Serious public health problems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can cause an infodemic. Sources of information that may cause an infodemic include Internet searches and social networking services; YouTube, which consists of content created and uploaded by individuals, is one such source. OBJECTIVE To survey the relationship between YouTube regarding COVID-19 and Internet searches in Japan. METHODS We used Google Trends to survey the relationship between YouTube regarding COVID-19 and Internet searches in Japan. YouTube searches were performed on March 6, 2020 (before the state of emergency), April 14 (during the state of emergency), and May 27 (after the state of emergency was lifted), with 136, 113, and 140 sample videos evaluated, respectively. The Google Trends search was conducted from January 22nd to May 23rd, 2020. The main outcome measures were: (1) The characteristics of each video and (2) uploaded video and Google Trends. RESULTS Of the videos evaluated over the three periods, the total number of videos after removing duplicates was 331. Content related to COVID-19 was present in 23.3% of videos, content related to preventing the spread of infection in 20.5%, content related to treatment in 2.1%, and the other category represented 54.1% of videos. Only 9.1% of the videos were uploaded by healthcare professionals. In the periods before and after the state of emergency, with 7 April as the point of reference, there were 2.9 per day and 2.4 per day uploads before and after the state of emergency, respectively. Regarding Google Trends, before and after the state of emergency, there were 29.5 per day and 54.9 per day total searches, respectively. There were more videos of content related to COVID-19 in March than in April or May (p = .03, p = .03). CONCLUSIONS The information on COVID-19 did not indicate a relationship between the number of YouTube uploads and the number of Internet searches. Most of the videos on COVID-19 were created and uploaded by individuals. Therefore, people need to take great care when obtaining information from YouTube before or early in a pandemic, during which time scientific evidence is scarce.