BACKGROUND
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an infodemic, and the need for rapid and accurate information seeking and providing has become an urgent issue. Community pharmacies play an important role in supporting the health of residents as “Communicators”. In the early stages of the pandemic in Japan, there was a lack of information in pharmacies about infection control written in Japanese. Therefore, the Pharmacy Informatics Group (Kyoto, Japan) published a Japanese-language web page to disseminate this information. Nevertheless, the information-seeking behavior of Japanese pharmacists during disasters such as COVID-19 has not been fully evaluated.
OBJECTIVE
This study aims to evaluate the information-seeking behavior of community pharmacists during the COVID-19 pandemic, with relation to COVID-19 infections and deaths within their local prefecture.
METHODS
An ecological study comparing the number of accesses to the web page established by the Pharmacy Informatics Group and the number of infections and deaths in 47 prefectures was conducted. Total number of accesses (TA), total number of infections (TI) per 100,000 population, total number of deaths (TD) per 100,000 population, and number of pharmacists per 100,000 population for the 47 prefectures during the target period (April 6 to September 30, 2020) were calculated using the access information on the web page and public information.
RESULTS
In Japan, during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, TA was 226,130 (10,984–138,898), TI was 78,761 (1,738–31,857), and TD was 1,470 (39–436). The correlation between TA and TI per 100,000 population in 47 prefectures was r=.72 (95% CI: .55–.83, P<.001), and between TA and TD per 100,000 population in 47 prefectures was r=.44 (95% CI: .17–.65, P=.002).
CONCLUSIONS
Our findings indicate that information-seeking behavior of community pharmacists was positively correlated with infection status within the community.