Top Concerns of Tweeters During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Infoveillance Study

Abstract

Background The recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is taking a toll on the world’s health care infrastructure as well as the social, economic, and psychological well-being of humanity. Individuals, organizations, and governments are using social media to communicate with each other on a number of issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not much is known about the topics being shared on social media platforms relating to COVID-19. Analyzing such information can help policy makers and health care organizations assess the needs of their stakeholders and address them appropriately. Objective This study aims to identify the main topics posted by Twitter users related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Leveraging a set of tools (Twitter’s search application programming interface (API), Tweepy Python library, and PostgreSQL database) and using a set of predefined search terms (“corona,” “2019-nCov,” and “COVID-19”), we extracted the text and metadata (number of likes and retweets, and user profile information including the number of followers) of public English language tweets from February 2, 2020, to March 15, 2020. We analyzed the collected tweets using word frequencies of single (unigrams) and double words (bigrams). We leveraged latent Dirichlet allocation for topic modeling to identify topics discussed in the tweets. We also performed sentiment analysis and extracted the mean number of retweets, likes, and followers for each topic and calculated the interaction rate per topic. Results Out of approximately 2.8 million tweets included, 167,073 unique tweets from 160,829 unique users met the inclusion criteria. Our analysis identified 12 topics, which were grouped into four main themes: origin of the virus; its sources; its impact on people, countries, and the economy; and ways of mitigating the risk of infection. The mean sentiment was positive for 10 topics and negative for 2 topics (deaths caused by COVID-19 and increased racism). The mean for tweet topics of account followers ranged from 2722 (increased racism) to 13,413 (economic losses). The highest mean of likes for the tweets was 15.4 (economic loss), while the lowest was 3.94 (travel bans and warnings). Conclusions Public health crisis response activities on the ground and online are becoming increasingly simultaneous and intertwined. Social media provides an opportunity to directly communicate health information to the public. Health systems should work on building national and international disease detection and surveillance systems through monitoring social media. There is also a need for a more proactive and agile public health presence on social media to combat the spread of fake news.

Information on COVID-19 and Psychological Distress in a Sample of Non-Health Workers during the Pandemic Period

“…COVID-19-related content was identified on social media as follows: (a) updating new cases and their impact; (b) frontline reports on the epidemic and its prevention measures; (c) experts’ opinions on outbreaks of the infection; (d) frontline health services; and (e) global scope of the epidemic and identification of suspected cases [ 46 ]. The topics of greatest interest have also been identified: origin and transmission routes; magnitude of the impact on countries (infected and deaths, stress and fear, economy, movement restrictions), means of spreading, and risk control [ 47 ].…”

Genesis of an emergency public drug information website by the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…While the mass media must take responsibility for providing correct information and facilitating comprehension by citizens, the role of the SFPT as a scholarly society was to contribute to the national effort to provide reliable drug information. In addition, monitoring social media helps to anticipate questions from the population and fake news [18]. Before the pandemic, actions to counter health‐related misinformation circulating in social media were well described.…”

Psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic: The interplay between protective and risk factors

“…This aspect was also explained by Cava and colleagues (2005) during the SARS outbreak, when many participants reported that inconsistent information from various sources led them to question the reliability of available information. Moreover, as shown by others (Dominguez-Salas et al, 2020), when adequate information is lacking, people double their efforts to ll the informative gap, sometimes choosing non-reliable sources such as social media and internet (Abd-Alrazaq et al, 2020;Cuan-Baltazar et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2020) and contributing to creating overload. Therefore, during the COVID-19 lockdown, a condition in itself characterized by profound uncertainty, incomplete and inconsistent information, even if received by physician, together with an informative overload may have cast doubt on the reliability of information and on the trust placed in the health professionals, consequently generating higher levels of distress.…”