Timely and accurate information is foundational to mitigating and curing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) for both the public and the scientific community (Hua and Shaw, 2020). Misinformation on COVID-19, however, has also been proliferating on the Internet, especially on social media (Bastani and Bahrami, 2020). Moreover, repeated media exposure to crisis-related information elevates anxiety and stress responses among people (Garfin et al., 2020). The public may also receive information on COVID-19 from medical staff and laypeople. We were interested in the associations between the COVID-19-related information sources and people’s psychological well-being. We were also interested in whether the associations differed between health care workers and the public.

The Online Survey Study on COVID-19 in Taiwan recruited participants who were≥ 20 years old and lived in Taiwan through a Facebook advertisement on April 10 to April 20, 2020. We also posted the link of the Facebook advertisement to social media groups joined by health care workers. In the online survey, participants were asked whether they received COVID-19-related information frequently from the following sources: the Internet (including blogs, Internet news, and social media, such as Facebook, Line, Twitter, and Plurk), friends, traditional media (including television, newspapers, and radio broadcasting), formal lessons on COVID-19 (whether online or in-person), medical staff in health care settings, coworkers, and family members. We also assessed participants’ level of subjective psychological wellbeing on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (much worse) to 5 (much better)(Ko et al., 2006).