Impact of The Social Media on COVID-19: Is YouTube In or Out? (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic, which caused to closure of borders and curfews to be imposed all over the world, is one of the most important urgent public health problems in the last century. Youtube with billions of viewers per day has become one of the information points for COVID-19 in this period while face to face meeting is diminished. Many COVID-19 patients have talked about their experiences on Youtube. OBJECTIVE With this study, it has been aimed to evaluate the proficiency of videos about COVID-19 symptoms on Youtube. METHODS The terms “COVID 19 symptoms”, “coronavirus 19 symptoms”, “symptoms of coronavirus” and “symptoms of COVID 19” have been searched on Youtube on 01 April 2020, the videos that were uploaded in 2020 and viewed more than 10,000 times until then were scanned and 719 videos were examined. Records of duplicated videos have been excluded. Videos with an inappropriate language, videos with a duration of shorter than 1 minute, videos that have been deleted by the uploader and videos that contain information incompatible with the title excluded. The videos were examined by two physicians in terms of discussing the symptoms and wrong information and graded. In case there was a difference between two evaluators, peer-review has been made by a third reviewer. RESULTS A total of 719 videos were scanned and 202 videos were included in the study. 28.7% of the videos had been viewed more than 500,001 times. Among the uploaders Healthcare Personnel (3.5%) and Institutions (9.4%) are the two lowest groups. No grading difference has been found between Institutions, Healthcare Personnel, Individuals Other Than Healthcare Personnel and Unknown Uploaders (P: .13). Among the uploader groups with 12 and higher points, Individuals Other Than Healthcare Personnel stood out among other uploaders significantly with a ratio of 46.7% (P: .02). Only 4.1% of the videos included wrong/imperfect information and a statistically significant relation between uploader groups was not determined (.35). CONCLUSIONS It is important that COVID-19 symptoms are reflected correctly on Youtube, which is one of the most frequently used sites all over the world, in terms of people recognizing the disease in the time of pandemic and isolating themselves and making the decision to apply for a healthcare provider. We are of the opinion that creation of more content by healthcare personnel, in a period with such heavy social media usage, will be useful in terms of informing the public.