There were 20,144 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 2,652 on Monday, the 3rd to 3,490 on Tuesday, the 4th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 7,607. Remdesivir had the fewest tweets this week with 915.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was cleared for use as a booster for12-15 year olds by the FDA
- In the U.S., more schools went remote than at any other time this academic year
- CDC advisors recommended Covid-19 boosters for 12-15 year olds
- Hong Kong banned flights from the U.S. and 7 other countries, along with other curbs, after the first Omicron infection was detected
- Employee absences as a result of Covid-19 is straining both public and private business
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -20.63 for Remdesivir on Saturday the 8th to 12.12 for Hydroxychloroquine on Thursday the 6th.
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. Coldness, Cold had the highest overall net sentiment of 5.17. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-41.95).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 630 | 0.18 |
| Sickness | 324 | -27.31 |
| Flu | 168 | -26.94 |
| Coldness, Cold | 103 | 5.17 |
| Blisters, Blister | 101 | -0.20 |
| Pneumonia | 84 | -3.35 |
| Cancer | 78 | -41.95 |
| Blindness, Blind | 71 | -1.09 |
| Fever | 68 | -22.22 |
| Worry | 65 | -12.33 |
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 535 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) Pneumonia, (5) Blindness, Blind, (6) Flu, (7) Fall, (8) Headache, (9) Worry, (10) MS. Of these terms, Fall (n=16), Headache (n=14), MS (n=12) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 871 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) Cancer, (5) Pneumonia, (6) Poisoning, (7) Pain, (8) Fever, (9) Worry, (10) Fear. Of these terms, Poisoning (n=33), Pain (n=30), Fear (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 “cdc” 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 “die” 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 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 do not recommend the J&J vaccine I haven’t been this sick in like 5 years before the pandemic I couldn’t even sleep last night I woke up shaking like I was having a seizure my whole body is sore today I have a headache and literally everything hurts | johnson and johnson vaccine | Headache, Seizure, Shaking, Sickness |
| Omicron after 2 moderna vaccine and a booster. Symptoms came in 4 days after exposure. Wicked sore throat, chills, fever, skin hurting, body aches. Tested positive only when fever struck. Fever gone after 36 hours. Feels like bad strep throat plus light flu | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Fever, Flu, Sore throat |
| Received my booster jab yesterday, and this time, I’d decided to take the Pfizer-BioNTech COMIRNATY vaccine instead, after having some unpleasant reactions previously with the Moderna jab. . So far, aside from a slight pain at the injection point, I’m feeling fine.
#Booster |
pfizer vaccine | Pain |
| _shadowy I took Moderna vaccine 1 & 2.. both 21A. I had almost no symptoms. Maybe a hint of fatigue. Yesterday took the 21A moderna booster and Holy Shit. Up all night with fever, cold sweats, sore throat, intense body aches. Got no sleep at all. Still feel like shit today. | moderna vaccine | Ache, Coldness, Cold, Cold sweat, Fatigue, Fever, Sore throat, Sweating |
| I had my first dose, of Moderna vaccine yesterday. Woke up with a sore arm and fatigue. | moderna vaccine | Fatigue |
| Tested positive for Covid yesterday with my first cold-like symptoms hitting Sunday. Today I’ve felt terrible, been asleep for probably 16 or more hours today. I got prescription medicine, one being Ivermectin, and after I took it today I’m feeling much better. It works. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| My #Covid_19 regiment: 1. Ivermectin 2. Indomethacin 3. Minocylcine 4. Pepcid 5. Claritin 6. Aspirin (81mg)
I’m on day 4 of symptoms. No fever for 2 days now. Headache, body ache, sore throat, cough, congestion, minor chest discomfort. Still taste and smell. |
ivermectin | Ache, Chest discomfort, Coughing, Cough, Discomfort, Fever, Headache, Sore throat |
| On the 28th of November I got my first Pfizer-Vaccine. The next day a prior condition of pleurisy returned, I had severe memory loss, extreme brain fog and nausea, which then I took off a few days from work because I was struggling to breathe. | pfizer vaccine | Memory loss, Nausea |
| Speaking from my own personal experience, and shouldn’t need to point out here that EVERYONE is different, I had horrible reactions to Moderna. My first Moderna vaccine I had a delayed response,so symptoms occurred about 7 days later. I developed vey swollen lymph nodes, worse | moderna vaccine | Swollen lymph nodes |
| i got the pfizer vaccine today and i started to believe that i defeated the side effects,now i’m feeling dizzy and i feel like i have no energy<U+0001F629> | pfizer vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy |
| I got the J&J vaccine and a Moderna booster, I got kinda sick after I got it but I feel fine now | johnson and johnson vaccine | Sickness |
| I also got triple jab already from Pfizer vaccine. 3rd jab was the worst one. I almost die because the 3rd jab is quite strong. My body is so weak and cannot sweat too. | pfizer vaccine | Sweating, Weakness |
| Yeah got the Pfizer vaccine I wasn’t taking chances this probably helped reduce the effects but I still had fever, chills, body aches super exhausted and loss of taste, cough some sinus pressure but I think I turned the corner and the worst is over.<U+0001F60A> | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Chills, Coughing, Cough, Exhaustion, Fever, Fever chills, Loss of taste, Sinusitis |
| Day 2 of having the Moderna vaccine booster: bro this is no joke
knocked me out cold + gave me shivers and a temperature throughout the night but feeling better |
moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Shivers, Shivering |
| I am boosted! I have had 3 doses of Moderna vaccine. I am currently +ve for Omicron, it has been the same for 10 days now. Symptoms vary everyday. One day you are fine, and suddenly you get chills, body ache or fever, throat is worst. It may FEEL mild, but it’s too unpredictable. | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Fever |
| I got the Moderna vaccine and booster. The 2nd day I had a fever of 101. By the 3rd day I was totally fine! | moderna vaccine | Fever |
| Okay…. Question: I had two doses of the Moderna vaccine and a Moderna booster in November. What are my chances of getting Covid? I’m gonna get tested sometime tomorrow.
(I’ve been feeling mildly fatigued the past couple days and my chest’s been hurting, but not too long) |
moderna vaccine | Fatigue |
| When I had Covid in April of 2021, I never lost taste or smell. Fever, aches, joint pain, fatigue, and a nasty cough. The cough lingered for nearly four weeks after everything else went away. Ivermectin seemed to take the cough away after one dose. Go figure | ivermectin | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Fatigue, Fever, Joint pain, Pain |
| I had covid in March ‘20 & again recently. Ivermectin knocked out the allergic reaction portion on day 8 within 3 hours of taking medicine. I literally felt a 50% reduction in body aches over 15 minutes. It was so abruptly easing it woke me up. Current policies are murderous. | ivermectin | Ache, Allergic reaction |
| Going to quickly thank moderna booster shot and my Pfizer vaccine because I feel better with COVID than I did this summer when I got some random cold/sinus infection. Other vaccinated people are feeling pretty icky so I’m pretty sure the booster saved me the worst of it. | pfizer vaccine | Infection |
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: Jan 11, 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.