earticle

영어

The emergence of public health events has a devastating impact on the health of people. However, it is still unclear whether the outbreak of public health emergency event would influence the people’s health behaviors in online health communities. In this study, we collect the data of users’ physical activities and content-generation activities from a large online health community in China from January 2019 to April 2021, in which period COVID-19 had outbroken in China. Through adopting an interrupted time-series strategy, we find that users expend greater effort on improving the physical activity level as compared with the time before the COVID-19. The burst of COVID-19 makes people pay more attention to their health and improve their health awareness. Furthermore, we observe that after the COVID-19, users are more likely to share contents on the community. Our results have implications for public health and online community management.