Population-Scale Study of Human Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis and Implications
Jina Suh, Eric Horvitz, Ryen W. White, Tim Althoff
The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed our lives beyond just our physical health. To understand the impact of the pandemic and associated policy decisions on a multitude of human needs, we propose a computational methodology, building on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that can capture a holistic view of relative changes in needs following the pandemic through a difference-in-differences approach that corrects for seasonality and volume variations. When applied to over 35 billion search interactions spanning over 36000 ZIP codes in the US, we found that the expression of basic human needs has increased exponentially while higher-level aspirations declined, that the durations of shelter-in-place mandates significantly impacted social-emotional needs, and that there are potential barriers to meeting critical needs online.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{suh2020populationscale,
title = {Population-Scale Study of Human Needs During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis and Implications},
author = {Jina Suh and Eric Horvitz and Ryen W. White and Tim Althoff},
year = {2021},
booktitle = {WSDM},
doi = {10.1145/3437963.3441788},
eprint = {2008.07045},
archivePrefix = {arXiv}
}