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Objectives: To investigate worry about COVID-19 during the pandemic, and whether worry was associated with phase of the pandemic, COVID-19 death and incidence rates, Government interventions (including lockdown and advertising), age, being clinically at-risk, ethnicity, thinking that the Government had put the right measures in place, perceived risk of COVID-19 to self and the UK, and perceived severity of COVID-19., Design: Secondary analysis of a series of cross-sectional surveys., Setting: 73 online surveys conducted for the English Department of Health and Social Care between 28 January 2020 and 13 April 2022., Participants: Participants were people aged 16 years and over living in the UK (approximately 2000 per wave)., Primary Outcome Measures: Our primary outcome was self-reported worry about COVID-19., Results: Rates of being 'extremely' or 'very' worried changed over time. Worry increased as infection rates increased and fell during lockdowns, but the association became less obvious over time. Respondents aged 60 years and over were less likely to be worried after the launch of the vaccination campaign, while those who were clinically at-risk or from a minoritised ethnic community were more likely to be worried. Higher worry was associated with higher perceived risk, and higher perceived severity of COVID-19. There was no evidence for an association with agreeing that the Government was putting the right measures in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The launch of graphic Government advertising campaigns about COVID-19 had no noticeable effect on levels of public worry., Conclusions: In future infectious disease outbreaks, spikes in worry may attenuate over time, although some sections of society may experience higher anxiety than others., Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors received financial support from NIHR for the submitted work. RA and LES are employees of the UK Health Security Agency; HWWP received additional salary support from Public Health England and NHS England; has a PhD student who works at and has had fees paid by Astra-Zeneca. GJR and LES receive consultancy fees from the Sanofi group of companies. The authors have no other financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years, and no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. NTF is a participant of an independent group advising NHS Digital/England on the release of patient data. All authors were participants of the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or its subgroups., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)

Background: Wikipedia is the largest free online encyclopedia and the seventh most visited website worldwide, containing >45,000 freely accessible English-language medical articles accessed nearly 1.6 billion times annually. Concerns have been expressed about the balance of content related to biological sex on Wikipedia., Objective: This study aims to categorize the top 1000 most-read (most popular) English-language Wikipedia health articles for June 2019 according to the relevance of the article topic to each sex and quality., Methods: In the first step, Wikipedia articles were identified using WikiProject Medicine Popular Pages. These were analyzed on 13 factors, including total views, article quality, and total number of references. In the second step, 2 general medical textbooks were used as comparators to assess whether Wikipedia's spread of articles was typical compared to the general medical coverage. According to the article's content, we proposed criteria with 5 categories: 1="exclusively female," 2="predominantly female but can also affect male individuals," 3="not sex specific or neutral," 4=predominantly male but can affect female individuals," and 5="exclusively male.", Results: Of the 1000 Wikipedia health articles, 933 (93.3%) were not sex specific and 67 (6.7%) were sex specific. There was no statistically significant difference in the number of reads per month between the sex-specific and non-sex-specific articles (P=.29). Coverage of female topics was higher (50/1000, 5%) than male topics (17/1000, 1.7%; this difference was also observed for the 2 medical textbooks, in which 90.2% (2330/2584) of content was not sex specific, female topics accounted for 8.1% (209/2584), and male topics for accounted for 1.7% (45/2584; statistically significant difference; Fisher exact test P=.03). Female-category articles were ranked higher on the Wikipedia medical topic importance list (top, high, or mid importance) than male-category articles (borderline statistical significance; Fisher exact test P=.05). Female articles had a higher number of total and unique references; a slightly higher number of page watchers, pictures, and available languages; and lower number of edits than male articles (all were statistically nonsignificant)., Conclusions: Across several metrics, a sample of popular Wikipedia health-related articles for both sexes had comparable quality. Wikipedia had a lower number of female articles and a higher number of neutral articles relative to the 2 medical textbooks. These differences were small, but statistically significant. Higher exclusively female coverage, compared to exclusively male coverage, in Wikipedia articles was similar to the 2 medical textbooks and can be explained by inclusion of sections on obstetrics and gynecology. This is unlike the imbalance seen among biographies of living people, in which approximately 77.6% pertain to male individuals. Although this study included a small sample of articles, the spread of Wikipedia articles may reflect the readership and the population's content consumption at a given time. Further study of a larger sample of Wikipedia articles would be valuable., (©Nuša Farič, Henry WW Potts, James M Heilman. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 12.09.2024.)