People identified their primary reason for using social media during COVID-19 as a means to stay socially connected when more traditional forms of socialization were not possible. More specifically, people found entertainment from staying in touch with others and felt a sense of solidarity by seeing other people's experiences with COVID-19 online.

Social Media During COVID-19: Social Connection

Many countries are using social media as a way to guide the general public through this pandemic. These forums (such as WhatsApp in Singapore) can help the government provide easily accessible updates and guidelines in each stage of the virus as it impacts society. 

University of California, Davis

Many existing technologies and practices have been improved and optimized for larger scale operations, including:

- Contact Tracing
- Telehealth (Telemedicine)
- Big Data
- Barriers to Collaborative COVID-19 research

Focuses of Health Information Technology and COVID-19

Ting, D.S.W., Carin, L., Dzau, V. et al. (2020) Digital technology and COVID-19. Nat Med 26, 459–461. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-0824-5

Digital Technology and COVID-19

Contact tracing is used by health departments to prevent the spread of infectious disease. In general, contact tracing involves identifying people who have an infectious disease (cases) and people who they came in contact with (contacts) and working with them to interrupt disease spread. This includes asking people to isolate and their contacts to quarantine at home voluntarily. Contacts are also asked to monitor their symptoms daily, e.g., temperature checks, self-assessments based on common symptoms, and to get tested if any symptoms develop during their isolation.

What is Contact Tracing?

Telehealth are health-related services and information through electronic communication technologies to help patients with or people influenced by COVID-19. It allows long-distance patient and clinician care, education, and monitoring. Telemedicine is sometimes used as a synonym, or is used in a more limited sense to describe remote clinical services, such as diagnosis and monitoring. 

Telehealth (telemedicine) and COVID-19

- Time-consuming to self-judge many rapidly released papers
- Difficult to efficiently inform the research community about inappropriate results/findings
- Repetition and contradiction
- Cognitive overload and determining the novelty of a new study
- Published papers are static and don't get updated dynamically
- Difficult for multidisciplinary research collaboration 
- The increased role of preprint servers in COVID-19 research
- Marketing and subscription fees of journals
- Personal ambitions and carrier incentives
- Even the papers published journals are not completely flawless when the time is the essence.
- Difficulty informing the public


Current Barriers Related to COVID-19 Collaborative Research

Social Media and COVID-19

This can be done via contact tracing as people adapt to the "new normal".  This allows  clinical personnel to recognize infection hotspots and notify personnel of of possible new cases. This method is used to slow down and the pandemic and plauteau the curve.

Digital Monitoring

Big data is a field that analyze data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software or manpower. In the pandemic of Covid-19, many countries have turned to this field to minimize the impact of the pandemic by analyzing and evaluating the possibility of certain people to be infected. Hospitals and care facilities can then be alerted beforehand, and the likelihood of an undetected outbreak is reduced.

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