Awareness and attentiveness have implications for the acceptance and adoption of disease prevention and control measures. Social media posts provide a record of the public’s attention to an outbreak. To measure the attention of Chinese netizens to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a pre-established nationally representative cohort of Weibo users was searched for COVID-19-related key words in their posts.

COVID-19-related posts (N = 1101) were retrieved from a longitudinal cohort of 52 268 randomly sampled Weibo accounts (December 31, 2019–February 12, 2020).

Attention to COVID-19 was limited prior to China openly acknowledging human-to-human transmission on January 20. Following this date, attention quickly increased and has remained high over time. Particularly high levels of social media traffic appeared around when Wuhan was first placed in quarantine (January 23–24, 8–9% of the overall posts), when a scandal associated with the Red Cross Society of China occurred (February 1, 8%), and, following the death of Dr Li Wenliang (February 6–7, 11%), one of the whistleblowers who was reprimanded by the Chinese police in early January for discussing this outbreak online.

Limited early warnings represent missed opportunities to engage citizens earlier in the outbreak. Governments should more proactively communicate early warnings to the public in a transparent manner.

The purpose was to examine the relationship between the complexity of structural heart disease and psychological well-being in adults with congenital cardiac disease.

A total of 380 patients registered at the Adult Congenital Heart Clinic in Calgary, Alberta, Canada were surveyed. The patients were mailed a socio-demographic questionnaire and an instrument to measure psychological well-being. The instrument of psychological well-being measures six dimensions: positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. Of the 380 patients surveyed, 85 of 205 patients with simple structural malformation responded, giving a response rate of 41%, and 78 of 175 patients with complex malformations, thus giving a response of 45%.

There was no statistically significant difference in the mean scores of each of the six dimensions of psychological well-being between those patients with simple and complex malformations. Two-way analysis of variance, and multivariate analysis of variance, found significant differences in mean scores for dimensions when other socio-demographic variables were included in the analysis. For example, significantly higher mean scores for the dimension of purpose in life was found in patients who obtained a higher level of education (p = 0.009), and in patients who were employed (p < 0.001). We present the socio-demographic variables that statistically impact the mean scores for the dimension of psychological well-being.

Psychological well-being is not affected by the complexity of the structural congenital cardiac disease. Certain socio-demographic variables that impact psychological well-being, nonetheless, must be considered when developing multidisciplinary programmes to care for young adults with congenitally malformed hearts.