Successful navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic is predicated on public cooperation with safety measures and appropriate perception of risk, in which emotion and attention play important roles. Signatures of public emotion and attention are present in social media data, thus natural language analysis of this text enables near-to-real-time monitoring of indicators of public risk perception.
The spreading of COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied an by an infodemic, defined as an overabundance of misinformation and disinformation. Infodemic is an emergent phenomenon due to information dissemination with unintended consequences of the complex dynamics of human behavior.
Government’s policies in response to the Covid-19 crises have varied from highly restrictive social distancing measures closing most public spaces to rather flexible ones. However, from the complex systems perspective, it is also important to consider the decentralized emergence of community’s practices in response to the pandemic. The present article discusses the emergence and dynamics of community resilience by empirically investigating the case of the favela of Paraisópolis in São Paulo, Brazil.
In the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns have succeeded in limiting contagions in many countries, at however heavy societal costs: more targeted non-pharmaceutical interventions are desirable to contain or mitigate resurgences. Contact tracing, by identifying and quarantining people who have been in prolonged contact with an infectious individual, has the potential to stop the spread where and when it occurs, with thus limited impact.