Online Health Information Seeking Behaviour Due to COVID-19 Pandemic-Induced Health Related Anxiety among the General...

Persons with anxiety regarding health may have an increased tendency to seek online health information especially during a pandemic. The primary objective of this study was to determine COVID-19 induced health anxiety among the general population in India using Google Trends data.

Online health information seeking behaviour with respect to high-risk comorbid conditions for severe COVID-19 disease during the pandemic period was compared to that of the previous year. Correlation between the COVID-19 incidence and online health information seeking behaviour was also computed to explore if the observed health anxiety was due to the pandemic.

Overall, the online health information seeking behaviour was highest for diabetes both during (81.46±8.84) and before the pandemic (64.47±9.48). A significant increase (p<0.001) in the information seeking behaviour during the pandemic was observed with all the four high-risk comorbid conditions including diabetes (+16.99), hypertension (+22.57), lung disease (+21.79), and cardiovascular disease (+14.08). The behaviour with respect to diabetes (r=0.39), hypertension (r=0.48) and lung disease (r=0.69) showed significant positive correlation with the COVID-19 incidence. The observed health anxiety was regardless of prevalence, urbanization and literacy rates of individual states.

The general population in India has increased its online health information seeking behaviour during the pandemic and this may be due to an underlying health anxiety due to COVID-19.