Coronavirus: The Not‐So‐Trivial Loss of Well‐Being

Abstract The COVID‐19 outbreak has been one of the world's most severe challenges since World War II, which not only reflected in the observable economic depression, but also in emotional damage that is scarcely underscored. This paper estimates the effect of the epidemic on happiness of Chinese residents by capturing the emotions conveyed through massive social media, combined with city‐level epidemic data. We confirm the significant negative impact of the outbreak on life satisfaction, with an extra 1% of cumulative death cases associated with a 0.54% decrease in expressed happiness. Meanwhile, we find that well‐being drops the most in regions with high‐level risk of COVID‐19, and happiness in regions with higher or lower income levels are more vulnerable to the effects of the epidemic, in comparison to the intermediate‐level income regions. Female sentiment exhibits more sensitivity to the epidemic situation than does male sentiment. Furthermore, the timing of major public events also plays a sizable role in determining self‐reported happiness, and our results suggest that pandemic alerts announced by the World Health Organization significantly increased the loss of well‐being, while announcements of city‐unlocking had the opposite impact. The interaction between the outbreak and real‐time expressed happiness provides an important opportunity for reflection on the future governance policies of epidemic containment.