Information challenges of COVID-19: A qualitative research

BACKGROUND: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education set up a 24-h call center, i.e., Center 4030, to mitigate people's worries and anxieties, create composure, increase people's trust, and answer their questions. This qualitative study aimed to identify the challenges of COVID-19-related-information among people in point of experts' views. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This qualitative study was conducted to collect the opinions of experts on the identification of the Information challenges of COVID-19 during March–June 2020. The research population included all health professionals and experts. The sampling method was initially purposive and continued to saturate the data as snowball technique. In this study, 19 participants were interviewed. The data were collected using a semi-structured interview. After collecting the data, the audio files of the interviews were written down to extract their external and internal elements. MAXQDA version 12 software was used to organize qualitative analysis and coding data. RESULTS: The results of this study involved eight themes, i.e., lack of planning, lack of social trust in government, lack of COVID-19-integrated scientific authority in the country, conflicts of interest, lack of integrated information sources, distracting public attention, infodemic, and poor information quality, classified into 16 categories. CONCLUSIONS: The main information challenges that people in Iran faced included the lack of a scientific reference source to access accurate information, the existence of a large volume of information in virtual networks, and a huge volume of statistics from various information channels that caused confusion among people.