There were 25,693 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 2,201 on Sunday, the 12th to 4,577 on Thursday, the 16th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 9,011. Remdesivir had the fewest tweets this week with 615.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- The first Merck-made Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines are shipped
- Study out of Israel demonstrates a booster shot of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine provides good protection against the Omicron variant
- Some U.S. hospital systems in the U.S. drop requirement for Covid-19 vaccines for staff after a fedral judge temporarily halted a Biden administration mandate
- Prime minister Johnson of the U.K. describes a tidal wave of cases in the country while also announcing the first U.K. patient to die with the Omicron variant
- The first case of Omicron in China’s mainland is detected in Tianjin
- The Covid-19 antiviral pill by Pfizer that is under FDA review reduces the risk of hospitalization and appears to work against the Omicron variant
- A large real-world study found that Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine lowered the risk of hospitalizations by 70% for patients infecte with Omicron
- In the U.S., several colleges are returning to remote learning and companies are delaying return-to-office dates as the number of Covid-19 cases rises sharply
- FDA advisers recommend the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine over Johnson & Johnson’s for adults due to a higher rate of a blood-clotting condition than previously thought
- New Covid-19 cases in New York state reach a daily record of 21,027 new cases
- Pfizer post-pones plans to request authorization of their vaccine in children 2-5 years old
- Fedral officials in the U.S. announce that schools can use frequent testing instead of quarantine for children exposed to someone with Covid-19
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -28.69 for Remdesivir on Wednesday the 15th to 13.92 for Moderna vaccine on Tuesday the 14th.
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 11.1. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-36.41).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 984 | 11.10 |
| Sickness | 257 | -29.20 |
| Flu | 174 | -26.47 |
| Worry | 114 | -20.75 |
| Fear | 110 | -27.32 |
| Inflammation | 109 | -18.26 |
| Fall | 104 | 1.84 |
| Cancer | 88 | -36.41 |
| Confused, Confusion | 77 | -3.22 |
| Coldness, Cold | 76 | -9.92 |
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 767 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Confused, Confusion, (4) Flu, (5) Worry, (6) Fear, (7) Coldness, Cold, (8) Blindness, Blind, (9) Fever, (10) Forgetfulness. Of these terms, Blindness, Blind (n=15), Fever (n=15), Forgetfulness (n=15) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 1042 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) Inflammation, (5) Worry, (6) Cancer, (7) Fear, (8) Poisoning, (9) Pain, (10) Coldness, Cold. Of these terms, Poisoning (n=44), Pain (n=31) 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 “johnson” within the search for “Moderna vaccine” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Johnson and johnson 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 “cut” within the search for “Ivermectin” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| I had very mild reactions to the J&J vaccine & Moderna booster – slightly sore arm from both & a few hours of tiredness from the Moderna. I’m 70. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Tiredness |
| I’m sick with Covid. My based doc prescribed me ivermectin and HCQ. I took them during my first bad day and my fever, body aches, and headaches all went away within the same day. I’m just dealing with a lingering cough
These meds work. <U+0001F921><U+0001F30E> cant bring this owl down |
ivermectin | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Headache, Sickness |
| Also just in case anyone was wondering i got the moderna booster (also had the moderna vaccine) and the first day I rally just had arm pain and second day I had a little nausea and felt kind of hot but nothing too crazy. Ares however had a 101 fever and was pukey and very sick 🙁 | moderna vaccine | Fever, Nausea, Pain, Sickness |
| I agree. I got the J&J vaccine. Minor and expected side effects (arm pain, some chills, fatigue). But after that went away, I’ve felt fine. Never got Covid. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Chills, Fatigue, Pain |
| I had two doses of the Pfizer vaccine and I was fine other than a sore arm but after my Booster I had a really sore arm felt like I had the flu and I ached all over. This lasted about 2 days. Both my husband and I had low grade fevers too. Good luck! | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Fever, Flu |
| I got my 4th dose of the Pfizer vaccine yesterday, having received my third jab in May. Other than feeling sleepy and experiencing moderate injection site pain, I feel great! | pfizer vaccine | Injection site pain, Pain, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| Ugh having Moderna vaccine is annoying, didn’t have a good night since I woke in the middle of the night and took a while to sleep and feeling tired and dizzy, I feel like I had a dream and I know I didn’t have a seizure just really tired and want to sleep again but it’s morning | moderna vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy, Seizure |
| me after pfizer vaccine booster, • my arm aches so bad • sleepy, even after drinking coffee • lost of appetite | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| > But lest you think I got a mild case: not true. On the first day of COVID-19, I had fever, chills, a bad cough, mucus filling my lungs, awful pain in every muscle of my body, terrible exhaustion, and I lost my sense of taste. | ivermectin | Chills, Coughing, Cough, Exhaustion, Fever, Fever chills, Pain |
| i got the moderna booster shot after j&j vaccine and as soon as i got home i took a pain relief pill just to be safe. i had no side effects besides just getting tired and a sore arm. but my brother also got the same booster and had a fever for a day <U+0001F62D> | johnson and johnson vaccine | Fever, Pain |
| My original Johnson and Johnson vaccine had 0 side effects and the arm pain was less than some blood tests I’ve had. My Pfizer booster is absolutely destroying my arm though <U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D> at least I’m not ill otherwise | johnson and johnson vaccine | Pain |
| I felt pretty bad (slight fever, sweats & headache) after my second Pfizer vaccine and after my Moderna booster. After my first Pfizer vaccine I just felt tired for a couple of days but no other side effects. | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Headache, Sweating |
| Welp! My sleep pattern is thrown off.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve now had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine and it’s amounted to only causing a slight burning sensation at my injection site twice and left me groggy for a lengthy period. It’s a great way start vacation. |
pfizer vaccine | Burn, Burning sensation, Groggy |
| The first time I got my J&J vaccine it was like I took some kind of strange paddo. Didn’t know anything anymore of those 2 days. Yesterday I got my booster, feels like I have a hangover. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Hangover |
| This booster shot is kicking my ass which is weird because the first and second doses didn’t of the Moderna vaccine. I’m basically having flu like symptoms muscles hurt, swollen and red around the injection site, cold chills and a slight fever <U+0001F912> | moderna vaccine | Chills, Coldness, Cold, Fever, Flu, Redness |
| Yes that’s me right now. When I got the second shot of the Moderna vaccine, I felt like I got hit by a truck. I was so sick. Now I’m starting to feel like that all over again lol. I’m happy my body is mounting an immune response, but man I feel awful. | moderna vaccine | Feels awful, Sickness |
| I just had a coworker tell me that ever since he had the Moderna vaccine he’s had headaches and sometimes his arms and legs go numb. He’s pissed. | moderna vaccine | Headache, Numbness |
| _b_Jasmine I had a reaction to my second Moderna vaccine, so I was really nervous about the booster. Sore arm for a few days and all was good. | moderna vaccine | Nervousness, Nervous |
| Took second dose of moderna vaccine yesterday. I feel like I’m dying. Seriously. I don’t think I have ever been so sick in my life. | moderna vaccine | Sickness |
| I was on 13th vaccinated with my 2nd dose of the Pfizer vaccine but I’m having tinnitus in my left side of the ear. ( I hear beats). I was inquiring for any professional remedy to this side effect so I can feel normal again. | pfizer vaccine | Tinnitus |
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 21, 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.