Objective  To examine the needs for information relevant to prevention and control of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) among the public during epidemic period and to provide references for health education and information dissemination in major infectious disease epidemic.

  Methods  All network user′s queries from January 28, 2020 through May 31, 2021 were extracted from two WeChat accounts (an official account of Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Ping′an AskBob account sponsored by an intelligent medication company). After data cleaning, word segmentation analysis was performed with general word segmentation database. Keyword popularity was assessed based on keyword frequency.

  Results  After excluding place names and irrelevant verbs, totally 11 780 words were obtained with segmentation analysis on 42 541 cleaned queries. The top 20 most mentioned keywords were classified into 4 groups about COVID-19 vaccine, prevention and control policy, personal protective measures and infection symptoms. During the epidemic outbreak period (January 28 – February 20, 2020), the most of the queries were about issues related to self-protection, with the highest frequently involved word " mask" in 21.22% (3 317) of all queries. During the epidemic regression period (February 20 – April 28, 2020), the queries were concentrated on the epidemic prevention and control policies and the word "isolation" appeared in 23.85% (1 278) of the all queries. In the stage of normalized epidemic prevention and control (April 28, 2020 – May 31, 2021), the majority of the queries were associated with COVID-19 vaccination, with the most frequently involved words "COVID-19 vaccine/vaccine" in 39.82% (9 384) of the all queries.

  Conclusion  During the COVID-19 epidemic in Shanghai, the public paid more attentions to the disease prevention and control information related to their own interests. The result suggests that government departments should provide more clear and instructive information to the public to promote the implementation of epidemic containment measures.