BACKGROUND: This study examines the perceptions of the Australian public canvassed in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic about their health system compared to four previous surveys (2008, 2010, 2012 and 2018).
METHODS: In 2021, a nationwide online survey was conducted with a representative sample of Australians (N = 5100) recruited via market research panels. The results were compared to previous nationwide Australian survey samples from 2018 (N = 1024), 2012 (N = 1200), 2010 (N = 1201) and 2008 (N = 1146). The survey included questions consistent with previous polls regarding self-reported health status and overall opinions of, and confidence in, the Australian health system.
RESULTS: There was an increase in the proportion of respondents reporting positive perceptions at each survey between 2008 and 2021, with a significantly higher proportion of respondents expressing a more positive view of the Australian healthcare system in 2021 compared to previous years (χ2(8, N = 9645) = 487.63, p < 0.001). In 2021, over two-thirds of respondents (n = 3949/5100, 77.4%) reported that following the COVID-19 pandemic, their confidence in the Australian healthcare system had either remained the same (n = 2433/5100, 47.7%) or increased (n = 1516/5100, 29.7%). Overall, respondents living in regional or remote regions, younger Australians (< 45 years) and women held less positive views in relation to the system. In 2021, the most frequently identified area for urgent improvement was the need for more healthcare workers (n = 1350/3576, 37.8%), an area of concern particularly for Australians residing in regional or remote areas (n = 590/1385, 42.6%).
CONCLUSIONS: Irrespective of disruptions to the Australian healthcare system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Australians\' perceptions of their healthcare system were positive in 2021. However, concerns were raised about inadequate workforce capacity and the cost of healthcare, with differences identified by age groups and geographical location.
UNASSIGNED: Health consumer representatives from the Consumers Health Forum of Australia contributed to the co-design, deployment, analysis and interpretation of the results of this survey. J.A. and L.W. from the Consumers Health Forum of Australia contributed to the development of the paper.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, consumer behavior has been affected by the perceived threat of the pandemic and economic uncertainty. This paper aims to explore the dynamic effects of COVID-19, consumer sentiment, economic policy uncertainty, and fuel prices on travel behavior in the United States. Using updated daily trip data, the results show that consumer sentiment has a positive long-run impact on travel demand for air and auto, suggesting that a positive change in consumer sentiment can boost demand for these modes of transportation in the long term. Additionally, consumer sentiment has a favorable effect (1.34) on demand for long-distance trips, but it has a negative impact (-0.42) on the number of people staying at home. Economic and political shocks have a detrimental impact on demand for air and auto travel, suggesting that consumers reduce the frequency and cost of these transport services if they have pessimistic expectations about the future state of the economy and policy. However, in the short term, US travelers appear to be insensitive to shocks in consumer sentiment and economic policy uncertainty. Regarding the perceived threat of the pandemic, the results indicate that rising COVID-19 cases have a negative long-term effect on demand for air travel (-0.09) and public transit (-0.19), while they are positively associated with demand for auto travel (0.06). Similarly, the increasing number of deaths due to COVID-19 has led to a shift from shared-use mass transportation (air travel and public transit) to private autos and non-motorized travel, such as walking in the short term.

This paper investigates the effect of information about cross-country ratings of the government\'s and the public\'s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic on consumers\' macroeconomic expectations and sentiment. We conduct consumer surveys with randomized control trials (RCTs) in two waves in Thailand and Vietnam. The information treatments have the strongest effect when the information shown contradicts consumers\' prior beliefs. In the first survey, conducted when the first lockdown was eased, treatment effects are stronger in Vietnam, causing more optimistic expectations and sentiment. In the second survey, conducted at the start of the second wave of infections, treatment effects are stronger in Thailand, causing a more pessimistic outlook.

Most e-commerce platforms allow consumers to post product reviews, causing more and more consumers to get into the habit of reading reviews before they buy. These online reviews serve as an emotional feedback of consumers\' product experience and contain a lot of important information, but inevitably there are malicious or irrelevant reviews. It is especially important to discover and identify the real sentiment tendency in online reviews in a timely manner. Therefore, a deep learning-based real online consumer sentiment classification model is proposed. First, the mapping relationship between online reviews of goods and sentiment features is established based on expert knowledge and using fuzzy mathematics, thus mapping the high-dimensional original text data into a continuous low-dimensional space. Secondly, after obtaining local contextual features using convolutional operations, the long-term dependencies between features are fully considered by a bidirectional long- and short-term memory network. Then, the degree of contribution of different words to the text is considered by introducing an attention mechanism, and a regular term constraint is introduced in the objective function. The experimental results show that the proposed convolutional attention-long and short-term memory network (CA-LSTM) model has a higher test accuracy of 83.3% compared with other models, indicating that the model has better classification performance.

The economic crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic induced many governments to provide financial assistance to households. Using representative consumer surveys conducted during the pandemic in 2020, we examine the effects of this fiscal policy instrument on households in two emerging economies, Thailand and Vietnam. Our paper contributes to the literature by studying how consumer sentiment and durable spending relate to receiving government financial support and the underlying transmission channels for these responses. We find that financial support to households is related to more positive consumer sentiment and increases in actual and planned durable spending, while also being correlated with a more optimistic macroeconomic outlook, higher trust in the government, and higher personal well-being.

We study the dynamic relationships between consumer expenditures and consumer sentiment in the pre- and during the COVID-19 periods. Our results indicate that sentiment is closely related to consumption as consumers seem to maintain a long memory of the impact of sentiment during the period of the pandemic relative to the pre-pandemic period. We also found asymmetric behavior of consumption growth with and without the influence of sentiment during each sub-period. We offer some specific policy implications that are beneficial to the US economy and other countries.

We investigate gender differences in the effects of unemployment and sentiment on suicide rates. Using monthly Australian data, we find a positive relationship between the unemployment rate and the suicide rate, and a negative relationship between consumer sentiment and the suicide rate. However, there is strong evidence of nonlinearity in the effects of both unemployment and sentiment on suicide rates, with substantial gender differences. For men, an increase in the unemployment rate increases the suicide rate, but an unemployment decrease has no effect; we find the opposite for women. For men, an increase in sentiment has stronger effects on the suicide rate than a decrease in sentiment. Again, we observe the opposite effect for women. Among sentiment components, forward-looking expectations are stronger predictors of suicide rates than present conditions. Sentiment has a much stronger effect on male suicide rates than on female suicide rates.

Policy Points Preventive measures such as the national lockdown in Italy have been effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19. However, they also had psychological and economic impacts on people\'s lives, which should not be neglected as they may reduce citizens\' trust and compliance with future health mandates. Engaging citizens in their own health management and in the collaboration with health care professionals and authorities via the adoption of a collaborative approach to health policy development is fundamental to fostering such measures\' effectiveness. Psychosocial analysis of citizens\' concerns and emotional reactions to preventive policies is important in order to plan personalized health communication campaigns.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, between February 23 and March 8, 2020, some areas of Italy were declared \"red zones,\" with citizens asked to stay home and avoid unnecessary interpersonal contacts. Such measures were then extended, between March 10 and May 4, 2020, to the whole country. However, compliance with such behaviors had an important impact on citizens\' personal, psychological, and economic well-being. This could result in reduced trust in authorities and lowered compliance. Keeping citizens engaged in their own health and in preventive behaviors is thus a key strategy for the success of such measures. This paper presents the results from a study conducted in Italy to monitor levels of people\'s health engagement, sentiment, trust in authorities, and perception of risk at two different time points.
Two independent samples (n = 968 and n = 1,004), weighted to be representative of the adult Italian population, were recruited in two waves corresponding to crucial moments of the Italian COVID-19 epidemic: between February 28 and March 4 (beginning of \"phase 1,\" after the first regional lockdowns), and between May 12 and May 18 (beginning of \"phase 2,\" after the national lockdown was partially dismissed). Respondents were asked to complete an online survey with a series of both validated measures and ad hoc items. A series of t-tests, general linear models, and contingency tables were carried out to assess if and how our measures changed over time in different social groups.
Although sense of self and social responsibility increased between the two waves, and trust toward authorities remained substantially the same, trust in science, consumer sentiment, and health engagement decreased. Our results showed that while both the level of general concern for the emergency and the perceived risk of infection increased between the two waves, in the second wave our participants reported being more concerned for the economic consequences of the pandemic than the health risk.
The potentially disruptive psychological impact of lockdown may hamper citizens\' compliance with, and hence the effectiveness of, behavioral preventive measures. This suggests that preventive measures should be accompanied by collaborative educational plans aimed at promoting people\'s health engagement by making citizens feel they are partners in the health preventive endeavor and involved in the development of health policies.

The views and experiences of the Australian public are an important barometer of the health system. This study provides key findings about the changing views held by Australians over time regarding their individual experiences and perceptions of the overall performance of the health system.
A population-based online survey was conducted in 2018 (N = 1024). Participants were recruited through market research panels. The results were compared with previous Australian population survey data sets from 2008 (N = 1146), 2010 (N = 1201) and 2012 (N = 1200), each of which used different population samples. The survey included questions consistent with previous surveys regarding self-reported health status, and questions about use, opinions and experiences of the health system.
Overall, there has been a shift in views from 2008 to 2018, with a higher proportion of respondents now viewing the Australian health-care system more positively (X2 (2, N = 4543) = 96.59, P < .001). In 2018, areas for attention continued to include the following: the need for more doctors, nurses and other health workers (29.0%); lower costs for care or Orion medicines (27.8%); more access to care (13.1%); and enhancements in residential aged care (17.3% rated these services as \'bad\' or \'very bad\').
This research suggests that Australians\' perceptions of their health-care system have significantly improved over the last decade; however, concerns have emerged over access to medicines, inadequate workforce capacity and the quality of aged care facilities. Our study highlights the value of periodically conducting public sentiment surveys to identify potential emerging health system problems.

The measurement of online sentiment is a developing field in social science and big data research. The methodology from this study provides an analysis of online sentiment using a unique combination of NLP and human validation techniques in order to create net sentiment scores and categorise topics of online conversation. The study focused on measuring the online sentiment of South Africa\'s major banks (covering almost the entire retail banking industry) over a 12-month period. Through this methodology, firms are able to track shifts in online sentiment (including extreme firestorms) as well as to monitor relevant conversation topics. To date, no published methodology combines the use of big data NLP and human validation in such a structured way.•Microsampling for manual validation of sentiment analysis (both qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to obtain the most accurate results)•Sentiment measurement•Sentiment map.