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The COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by a social media "infodemic": an overabundance of information whose authenticity may not always be guaranteed. With the potential to lead individuals to harmful decisions for the society, this infodemic represents a severe threat to information security, public health and democracy. In this paper, we assess the interplay between the infodemic and specific aspects of the pandemic, such as the number of cases, the strictness of containment measures, and the news media coverage. We perform a comparative study on three countries that employed different managements of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—namely Italy, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. We first analyze the three countries from an epidemiological perspective to characterize the impact of the pandemic and the strictness of the restrictions adopted. Then, we collect a total of 6 million posts from Facebook to describe user news consumption behaviors with respect to the reliability of such posts. Finally, we quantify the relationship between the number of posts published in each of the three countries and the number of confirmed cases, the strictness of the restrictions adopted, and the online news media coverage about the pandemic. Our results show that posts referring to reliable sources are consistently predominant in the news circulation, and that users engage more with reliable posts rather than with posts referring to questionable sources. Furthermore, our modelling results suggest that factors related to the epidemiological and informational ecosystems can serve as proxies to assess the evolution of the infodemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare workers have had the longest and most direct exposure to COVID-19 and consequently may suffer from poor mental health. We conducted one of the first repeated multi-country analysis of the mental wellbeing of medical doctors (n = 5,275) at two timepoints during the COVID-19 pandemic (June 2020 and November/December 2020) to understand the prevalence of anxiety and depression, as well as associated risk factors. Rates of anxiety and depression were highest in Italy (24.6% and 20.1%, June 2020), second highest in Catalonia (15.9% and 17.4%, June 2020), and lowest in the UK (11.7% and 13.7%, June 2020). Across all countries, higher risk of anxiety and depression symptoms were found among women, individuals below 60 years old, those feeling vulnerable/exposed at work, and those reporting normal/below-normal health. We did not find systematic differences in mental health measures between the two rounds of data collection, hence we cannot discard that the mental health repercussions of the pandemic are persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]