There were 17,243 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 1,781 on Sunday, the 26th to 3,358 on Thursday, the 30th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 7,013. Remdesivir had the fewest tweets this week with 910.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- U.S. daily Covid-19 cases are at the highest level in nearly a year, due to the spreading Omicron variant
- More than 2,000 flights were cancelled over the holiday weekend due to the increasing number of Covid-19 cases
- In the U.S., officials reduced the recommended number of days for quarantine from 10 to 5 for asymptomatic people who are infected with Covid-19
- Despite the surging number of cases in the U.S., many governors are applying a lighter touch to restrictions compared to earlier in the pandemic due to the availability of vaccines, new at-home treatments, and Covid-19 testing
- Research by the CDC suggests that reinfections by the Omicron variant often produces only mild Covid-19 symptoms
- Wealthy counties continue to receive a disproportionate share of vaccines despite an increase in the number of vaccines delivered to the poorest nations in recent months
- Legal battles between drug companies, government scientists, and academic scientists are taking shape over who invented which key elements of the Covid-19 vaccines
- A U.S. record of 265,427 new daily cases was reached
- A federal judge rejected Oklahoma’s attempt to stop the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for National Guard members
- Health experts and businesses believe that the relatively strict FDA approval process is part of a broaer failure to make an distribute sufficient Covid-19 rapid tests
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -31.2 for Remdesivir on Wednesday the 29th to 14.49 for Johnson and johnson vaccine on Thursday the 30th.
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 -6.69. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-51.76).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 478 | -6.69 |
| Sickness | 343 | -32.50 |
| Flu | 189 | -31.12 |
| Coldness, Cold | 123 | -8.72 |
| Pneumonia | 87 | -23.55 |
| Fear | 84 | -30.94 |
| Fever | 79 | -17.52 |
| Poisoning | 75 | -40.24 |
| Worry | 70 | -7.23 |
| Cancer | 61 | -51.76 |
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 529 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Coldness, Cold, (4) Flu, (5) Pneumonia, (6) Blindness, Blind, (7) Forgetfulness, (8) Worry, (9) Fever, (10) Allergy. Of these terms, Blindness, Blind (n=22), Forgetfulness (n=19), Allergy (n=14) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 1004 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Sickness, (2) Infection, (3) Flu, (4) Fear, (5) Pneumonia, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Poisoning, (8) Cancer, (9) Pain, (10) Heart attack. Of these terms, Pain (n=32), Heart attack (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 “like” within the search for “Ivermectin” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Ivermectin 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 “children” within the search for “Remdesivir” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Started having symptoms Christmas. Fatigue, aches, throat irritation. Mild but something. Got tested & yes, Covid. Worst night of symptoms Monday. Got monoclonal antibodies on Tuesday. Almost immediately symptoms subsided. Throat fine. Slept great. Feeling much better today. | monoclonal antibodies | Ache, Fatigue, Irritability, Irritable, Throat irritation |
| So I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine last night and let me say holy shit did this one kick my ass when I woke up this morning. I woke up dizzy with a slight headache in top of my left arm ( where I got the shot ) hurting so bad to the point I’m scared to move it. | pfizer vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy, Headache |
| 16.5 hours post Moderna vaccine:
really sore arm, chills, headache, muscle/joint pain and vomiting…. no fever though feeling like death <U+270C><U+0001F3FC> |
moderna vaccine | Chills, Fever, Headache, Pain, Vomiting |
| I got the Pfizer booster and I have really bad arm pit pain for about 4 days due to swollen lymph nodes. I had a low grade fever for a couple days and body aches.
I had the moderna vaccine originally. |
moderna vaccine | Ache, Fever, Pain, Swollen lymph nodes |
| Went to bed last night feeling a little achy. Woke up around 1am with a slight fever and more achiness. Covid test positive. Took Ivermectin, Ibuprofen and more of my D3, Zinc, etc….woke up this morning feeling 100%. Still have a slightly runny nose. Not vaxxed. | ivermectin | Fever, Runny nose |
| got my booster yesterday, I’ve only ever had the Pfizer vaccine which left me with a sore arm but got the Moderna yesterday & sore arm <U+2705> also was freezing & then really warm as well as hardly sleeping & a headache. I know it will pass but damn I feel truly awful. | pfizer vaccine | Headache |
| I had a BAD reaction to the J&J vaccine earlier in the year (chills, headaches, fever, shakes), but I got the Moderna last week and only had a sore arm. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Chills, Fever, Headache, Shaking |
| Tested positive for #covid on Dec 31st after a night of high fever, body aches and headache. Started taking #Ivermectin on the same day. A day later, fever and aches are gone. Just feeling tired. #OmicronVariant | ivermectin | Ache, Fever, Headache |
| I’ve got covid(friends I was with tested positive with symptoms like mine) Day 1-2 feeling tired , trained at gym Day 3 – at night I got chills and tiredess,muscle pains , temperature. Day 4- muscle pains, especially lower back.Tired but feel pretty good. Ivermectin + <U+0001F447> <U+0001F4AA> | ivermectin | Chills, Muscle pain, Pain |
| My third #Moderna vaccine kind of ruined Christmas: chills, fever, muscle aches, bad headache, cough. But it’s better than getting #OmicronVarient really bad I suppose? | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Headache, Muscle ache |
| yes! I barely even felt it, and my symptoms are well better compared to when I got the vaccine the first time. the booster shot: sore arm, j&j vaccine: headache, hot flashes, chills, nausea, and fever | johnson and johnson vaccine | Chills, Fever, Headache, Hot flashes, Nausea |
| _abumishari I got 1 pfizer vaccine like 9 months ago and it gave me extremely bad symptoms. Tbh the fucking vaccine was way worse than this. It gave me TERRIBLE headaches. | pfizer vaccine | Headache |
| _Real_Feisty Yeah, I did, too. Thought I just had a miserable, horrible cold caught from my son. But no, seems I got some kind of Covid. Seems his wife got a positive test two weeks ago. So, I just used the last ivermectin I had, and I feel quite a bit better. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| The ONLY thing that helped my wife’s COVID headache (which she described as the worst of her life) was ivermectin. She had Covid for 3 days with continually worsening headache and body pains. Then she took ivermectin and in 24 hours headache and aches were gone. | ivermectin | Ache, Headache, Pain |
| Just tested positive for COVID again (had it last December too). I got the J&J vaccine, haven’t gotten my booster yet :/.
Symptoms aren’t as bad as last year. No shortness of breath, still have my taste/smell. But it does feel like the worst man cold I’ve ever had. |
johnson and johnson vaccine | Coldness, Cold |
| Nah I got natural immunity which is also proven better than your jab and I was on ivermectin when I got COVID and had no problems other than pretty bad fatigue and my food sucked. No cough no breathing issues a 100 degree fever at one point and a slight headache but I was fine | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough, Fatigue, Fever, Headache |
| _alfredb I had the Moderna vaccine. Arm hurt for about 48 hrs. Felt a little dizzy but didn’t last long as they made me sit for 30 mins after I had it. The dizziness passed after bout 10 mins. | moderna vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy |
| Following Monday’s negative covid test, I got retested yesterday and it came back positive. I’ve had two doses of the Pfizer vaccine but haven’t had my booster. I had fever, a cough, muscle aches, and headache. Now locked up at home. Send soup. | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Headache, Muscle ache |
| 3/ Took veterinarian ivermectin and began feeling better in 6 hours. Bro#2 took 1st shot in May shot 2 in June. Suffering shingles ever since. Got COVID Christmas Day all symptoms worse plus chest pain. Took ivermectin started feeling better within 2 hours. | ivermectin | Chest pain, Pain, Shingles |
| Hi Kelly I’ve had it the last two weeks (I’ve had 3 doses of the pfizer vaccine) I had a sore head, runny eyes and felt fatigued. bloods sugars were generally well behaved ran higher on day 6&7 which coincided when I felt less hungry no ketones. hope you feel OK | pfizer vaccine | Fatigue |
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.
- C. Sievert. Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC Florida, 2020.
- Hao Zhu (2021). kableExtra: Construct Complex Table with ‘kable’ and Pipe Syntax. R package version 1.3.4.
- 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: Jan 04, 2022).
- 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.