There were 16,843 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 1,746 on Sunday, the 21st to 3,132 on Thursday, the 25th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 7,798. Monoclonal antibodies had the fewest tweets this week with 609.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- Protests in EU against new restrictions
- Omicron variant announced as variant of Concern on November 26, first detected in South Africa
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -39.51 for Remdesivir on Tuesday the 23rd to 13.04 for Moderna vaccine on Saturday the 27th.
The sentiment for each tweet is scored from -1 (most negative) to +1 (most positive) using VADER sentiment analysis. Net sentiment is calculated by summing the sentiment across all tweets for a given day and/or category, then normalizing the score by the number of tweets.
Medical conditions from the MedDRA dictionary
Infection was the most frequently observed medical condition mentioned. Infection had the highest overall net sentiment of -5.27. Fear had the lowest net sentiment this week (-32.22).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 606 | -5.27 |
| Sickness | 208 | -27.06 |
| Flu | 125 | -27.43 |
| Nervousness, Nervous | 125 | -25.08 |
| Fall | 86 | -19.54 |
| Fear | 74 | -32.22 |
| Worry | 72 | -9.65 |
| Inflammation | 67 | -22.50 |
| Blindness, Blind | 65 | -7.53 |
| Pain | 65 | -28.22 |
MedDra is a standardized medical terminology developed by the International Council for Harmonization Cross-referencing tweets against this list is a starting point for identifying medical conditions mentioned in tweets.
Cross-referencing the MedDRA dictionary by sentiment and topic
Positive tweets:
There were 437 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Flu, (4) Worry, (5) Blindness, Blind, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Fall, (8) Pain, (9) Redness, (10) Fever. Of these terms, Coldness, Cold (n=18), Redness (n=12), Fever (n=10) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 1007 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Nervousness, Nervous, (4) Flu, (5) Fall, (6) Pain, (7) Heart attack, (8) Inflammation, (9) Fear, (10) Worry. Of these terms, Heart attack (n=36) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Word-level analysis
The 25 most important words within positive tweets (compared to negative and neutral) tweets are shown in the treemap below. The size of each box represents the weighted score of each word. The word “vector” within the search for “Pfizer vaccine” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Pfizer vaccine had the highest overall weight.
The 25 most important words within negative tweets (compared to positive and neutral) tweets are shown in the treemap below. The word “africa” within the search for “Pfizer vaccine” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, “Ivermectin” had the highest overall weight within negative tweets.
This analysis of words evaluates the stemmed version of words using the Snowball algorithm. By stemming words, words with similar meaning, such as pain, painful & pained, are grouped together as simply “pain”.
Beta: text classification
Tweets that describe adverse events/side effects (first person point of view)
| tweet | search topic(s) | medical condition(s) mentioned |
|---|---|---|
| If anyone is having vaccine booster hesitancy, I got the Moderna vaccine and was VERY sick after the second dose. Like, haven’t been that sick since the flu, though it passed in ~24 hours.
Got my booster last night and have nothing to report past a sore arm and feeling tired. |
moderna vaccine | Flu, Sickness |
| since my pfizer vaccine my periods have been the worst ever. my cramps are unbearable and i feel extremely sick everytime… it’s a nightmare. | pfizer vaccine | Cramp, Nightmare, Nightmares, Sickness |
| _Siskind It’s half the dose of original Moderna vaccine. I had a headache and felt a little tired but overall, fine. | moderna vaccine | Headache |
| Side effects from booster with Janssen vaccine done yesterday: chills, headache, very slight fever up to now (managed with paracetamol) and agitated sleep with very vivid nightmares. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Agitated, Agitation, Chills, Fever, Headache, Nightmare, Nightmares |
| 30 hours after my Pfizer booster added to my Moderna vaccine, and I had aches, chills, and fever. Went to bed, and I was fine when I woke up. | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Fever |
| Just got my booster dose of the pfizer vaccine – anyone been having any side effects? I had a pretty bad fever after my second dose so I am just curious | pfizer vaccine | Fever |
| Had J&J vaccine, had a sore arm. Had Moderna booster, had a sore arm & tiredness the next day. That was it. I’m 70. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Tiredness |
| No. I had a reaction to the J&J vaccine – one night of fever chills and headache, and feeling down the next day, but that is normal. And I’m 74. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Chills, Feeling down, Fever, Fever chills, Headache |
_MD I received my first Pfizer vaccine on 17th June 2021, 3 weeks later:
|
pfizer vaccine | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Pain |
| I had the Moderna vaccine. within 8 hours had high fever – lasted three days. Worst was the joint inflammation. Every joint in my body felt like it was going to burst from the pressure. Hands & feet swelled. Awful! | moderna vaccine | Fever, Inflammation, Joint inflammation, Swelling |
Okay. Noting my reactions to the Pfizer vaccine:
|
pfizer vaccine | Fatigue, Feverish, Headache, Weakness |
| Glad you survive COVID! I had the same delayed reaction to the Moderna vaccine on the 2nd dose. The other two I just had a sore arm except the booster 1/2 dose gave me a slight fever to 99. something. | moderna vaccine | Fever |
| I had terrible side effects that lasted a week from the second Moderna vaccine, but the booster, which I was dreading, was just a 24 hour side effect scenario – mild flu-like symptoms…. chills, low grade fever, like that….. | moderna vaccine | Chills, Fever, Flu, Flu-like symptoms |
| Got my booster shot this weekend, 8 months after my 2nd #Pfizer vaccine, just ahead of the #holidayseason & “Winter Spike”. ! Felt light shoulder pain, nothing bad! #BoosterShots | pfizer vaccine | Pain, Shoulder pain |
| I had mine on Friday, Moderna vaccine we given a choice between that and Pfizer. I am just feeling a bit better. Sore arm, headache, sickness and aching limbs… #Booster | moderna vaccine | Ache, Headache, Sickness |
| Are there others here who developed chronic hives after their second dose of moderna vaccine?I’ve been having annoying hives for a month now ever since I got my second shot
I can’t live my life itchy every night |
moderna vaccine | Hives, Itchy |
| _Siskind 2nd Moderna vaccine kicked my ass. Booster reaction was mild. Tired, slight headache and a little achy for a few hours. Nothing I couldn’t handle or function with. I’m 70. | moderna vaccine | Headache |
| Man I got the Pfizer vaccine way back and legit only got a rash as a side effect but I got the moderna booster yesterday and RIP me I guess | pfizer vaccine | Rash |
| _Siskind Got Pfizer vaccine, Moderna booster. Sore arm and painful swollen gland in armpit of shot arm. Was gone within a week. My husband had same, and felt a little “puny” for about a half day the next day, but then was gone. | pfizer vaccine | Pain, Swollen glands |
| _Siskind I had the Moderna vaccine (2x) and the booster. Couple of days of very tired and one episode of chills. Done. Definitely worth it. | moderna vaccine | Chills |
This classifier was trained on a set of tweets manually reviewed and tagged. The classifier was trained using GloVe, a pretrained word embedding layer.
References
Webpage created in R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18) and R Studio (Version 1.4.1717) using the following packages: plotly, kableExtra, formattable, treemap, and wordpressr.
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- Martijn Tennekes (2021). treemap: Treemap Visualization. R package version 2.4-3.
- Simit Patel (2021). wordpressr: An API Wrapper for WordPress Site APIs. R package version 0.1.0.
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