There were 21,696 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 2,183 on Saturday, the 11th to 4,966 on Wednesday, the 8th. Pfizer vaccine had the most tweets this week with 10,948. Remdesivir had the fewest tweets this week with 840.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- New York City to require all private-sector workers to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 by December 27th
- Lab tests in South African suggest the Omicron variant can partially evade protection of vaccines
- Pfizer and BioNTech say lab tests demonstarate that a third dose of their vaccines neutralizes the Omicron variant; the two dise reigment was less effective
- Pfizer and BioNTech boosters are approved for 16- and 17-year-olds in the U.S.
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -29.95 for Remdesivir on Tuesday the 7th to 16.68 for Monoclonal antibodies on Thursday the 9th.
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 6.07. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-45.72).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 685 | 6.07 |
| Sickness | 201 | -33.89 |
| Flu | 160 | -26.44 |
| Fear | 112 | -21.33 |
| Coldness, Cold | 75 | -2.41 |
| Cancer | 73 | -45.72 |
| Fever | 73 | -18.23 |
| Worry | 72 | -15.43 |
| Pneumonia | 64 | -8.91 |
| Pain | 62 | -41.83 |
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 660 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Allergy, (3) Sickness, (4) Coldness, Cold, (5) Fear, (6) Flu, (7) Pneumonia, (8) Worry, (9) Blindness, Blind, (10) Fever. Of these terms, Allergy (n=45), Blindness, Blind (n=17) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 906 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Flu, (4) Fear, (5) Cancer, (6) Heart attack, (7) Pain, (8) Poisoning, (9) Worry, (10) Blindness, Blind. Of these terms, Heart attack (n=42), Poisoning (n=37), Blindness, Blind (n=27) 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 “approv” 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 “guillain” within the search for “Johnson and johnson vaccine” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, “Pfizer vaccine” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Got my booster shot Tuesday, had the worst reaction I’ve had to the Pfizer vaccine so far. Yesterday I was sore, dizzy, & nauseous. Today just sore. | pfizer vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy, Nauseous |
| I had the Pfizer booster last Thursday walk-in at CVS. Felt the same side effects from the initial J&J vaccine but felt worse. Chills, fatigue, headache, and an extremely sore arm on Friday. Body aches, fatigue and still couldn’t feel my arm on Saturday. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Ache, Chills, Fatigue, Headache |
| _apples I took the pfizer vaccine, and had basically no reaction for either dose. I just had a fever and a headache (which I believe the headache was partially my fault as I was dehydrated) and after a few hours they went away. My arm was also sore a bit but that was it! | pfizer vaccine | Dehydration, Fever, Headache |
| I had the Moderna vaccine. If I’m honest I felt horrible…like I had the flu…sore body, headache, and upset stomach. | moderna vaccine | Flu, Headache, Upset stomach |
| But after three negative covid rapid tests I gave up on the ivermectin and the symptoms have returned after almost completely vanishing yesterday. Seems unlikely that it’s a sinus infection as sore throat wad the first symptom, so now I’m wondering <U+0001F914> | ivermectin | Infection, Sinus infection, Sinusitis, Sore throat |
| I had no side effects from my Pfizer vaccine. The day after my booster, though, I felt lethargic and sniffly. I was able to take a 1/2 hour nap and then felt fine. Totally worth it. | pfizer vaccine | Lethargic |
| Can’t imagine why patients feel, an, or can breath better after being taken off of Remdesivir, for #CoVID_19, since it can cause fever, chills, cough Shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion, runny nose, nausea | remdesivir | Ache, Chills, Coughing, Cough, Fatigue, Fever, Fever chills, Headache, Loss of taste, Nausea, Runny nose, Sore throat |
| I got pfizer vaccine april my arm hurt I have stomach bloating ,arm i got the flu shot Dec 2021 I got blood clots trying to form in my wrist & arms . Its feels like muscle pinches, like nerves ending or blood not flowing . I feel sleepy don’t smell anything. Stomach bloated . | pfizer vaccine | Flu, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| I got the Moderna vaccine. My arm was sore and I had some tiredness. On 12/2, I was thrilled to get the Pfizer booster. About 24-36 hours later, I felt like shit for another 24-36 hours; spells of fatigue, fever, chills, some nausea and upset stomach. The Pfizer booster caused… | moderna vaccine | Chills, Fatigue, Fever, Fever chills, Nausea, Tiredness, Upset stomach |
| I had a very sore arm and horrible shivers after my second Moderna vaccine. Fortunately the later only lasted one night. Sore arm took a couple of days to go. Hope you feel better soon. | moderna vaccine | Shivers, Shivering |
| So Yesterday I went for my J&J vaccine. <U+0001F610> Right now I’m experiencing fever, extreme sweating, nausea, lower backpains, migraine, loss of appetite, dizziness, extreme body ache, painful joints. I can’t move my body coz of the pain. Every part of my body is in pain <U+0001F62D><U+0001F494> | johnson and johnson vaccine | Ache, Dizziness, Dizzy, Fever, Migraine, Nausea, Pain, Sweating |
| Starting the day after my 1st Pfizer vaccine, I was sleepy for about 24 hours. Plus my arm hurt for a couple of days. I had the exact same response (3 naps in one day!) after my booster. | pfizer vaccine | Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| i got the moderna vaccine!
first dose: sore arm after 1 day, lasted about a day second dose: fever, headache on the night itself for about 2 days (felt terrible) |
moderna vaccine | Fever, Headache |
| I had the Pfizer vaccine, but switched to Moderna for my booster. I had a slight headache immediately at the pharmacy, followed by two days of extreme fatigue. Luckily, I’m off from work every Friday and had the weekend to rest. I had no energy. | pfizer vaccine | Fatigue, Headache |
| i was tired and achy and my temperature went up a little bit (like 99 but not a full-on fever) but other than that i felt okay (and i got absolutely knocked out by the j&j vaccine when i got it lmao i had a fever for two days) | johnson and johnson vaccine | Fever |
| Had to go back to bed, don’t feel too great… thank you moderna vaccine last night. Ache, cold and muzzy head, at least its the wknd hopefully wear off by Monday #Moderna #vaccine #grateful #achesandpains #Saturday #tired #sorearm | moderna vaccine | Ache, Coldness, Cold |
| Godd my shoulder hurts got the Pfizer vaccine today and after taking passed out for 5 hours and woke up with a numb shoulder this ain’t fun | pfizer vaccine | Numbness, Passed out |
| Eversince I took Johnson and Johnson vaccine I’m experiencing the persistent of pains on my joints and bones especially on my legs | johnson and johnson vaccine | Pain |
| I got my second Pfizer vaccine last Sunday and I don’t regret it. I actually feel safer now. I was so afraid for so long, but I’m glad I finally conquered my fear. <U+0001F642> | pfizer vaccine | Fear |
| 2 days I had my 3rd moderna vaccine injection I’m fine, my arm pain is gone <U+0001F60A><U+0001F489> | moderna vaccine | Pain |
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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- Kun Ren and Kenton Russell (2021). formattable: Create ‘Formattable’ Data Structures. R package version 0.2.1.
- 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.
- WHO COVID-19 Dashboard. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2020. Available online: https://covid19.who.int/ (last cited: Dec 13, 2021).
- Hutto, C.J. & Gilbert, E.E. (2014). VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-based Model for Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text. Eighth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-14). Ann Arbor, MI, June 2014.