Impact of spatial distance on public attention and sentiment during the spread of COVID-19

The recent coronavirus pandemic impacted the mental health of people worldwide as it rapidly spread to most countries. Social media has provided a cost-effective method to examine these negative effects, but which aspects of the disease impacted the general population's psychology is not well understood. This study examined one potential factor that moderated people's responses to the fast-spreading, deadly coronavirus disease (COVID) during its emergence from January 2020 to March 2020. Applying sentiment analysis to 3.2 million COVID-related messages posted on Twitter from 189 countries, we examined how the physical distance to COVID impacted the attention and emotions of the general population as it spread around the globe. The spatial distance from each message's origin country to the nearest COVID-infected country was computed to use as an independent variable. Statistical analyses revealed that spatial distance significantly influenced both public attention and sentiment toward COVID, even when controlling for confounders. As the disease came closer, more tweets were posted and the average sentiment became more negative. These observations suggest that physical proximity to a threat influences how much attention people pay to the threat and how they respond to it emotionally. This is in line with previous disaster research and fits the psychological framework of construal level theory. Although these findings are limited in their generalizability, they have important implications. In practice, communicating the personal risks of a disease outbreak to distant people might increase public engagement in protective behaviors such as social distancing and hand washing, subsequently slowing disease spread.