There were 18,884 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 2,192 on Friday, the 21st to 3,876 on Tuesday, the 18th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 10,765. Johnson and johnson vaccine had the fewest tweets this week with 543.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- Laboratory tests demonstrated that Paxlovid, Pfizer’s Covid-19 pill is effective against the Omicron variant
- The U.S. government announced plans to make 400 million N95 masks available for free and would be available at pharmacies and community health centers
- Early Omicron hotspots in the U.S., such as New York and Washington D.C. are starting to see a decline in hospitalized Covid-19 cases
- Three new studies released by the CDC demonstrate that vaccines and booster shots offer superior protection against the Delta and Omicron variants
- The Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine requirement for federal employees was blocked by a federal judge
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -24.98 for Hydroxychloroquine on Saturday the 22nd to 9.58 for Johnson and johnson vaccine on Saturday the 22nd.
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. Fever had the highest overall net sentiment of -1.95. Cardiac arrest had the lowest net sentiment this week (-81.61).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 902 | -5.67 |
| Sickness | 279 | -29.92 |
| Flu | 129 | -26.02 |
| Cardiac arrest | 102 | -81.61 |
| Poisoning | 100 | -32.30 |
| Pain | 91 | -36.33 |
| Coldness, Cold | 76 | -5.52 |
| Pneumonia | 75 | -3.91 |
| Fear | 74 | -45.13 |
| Fever | 65 | -1.95 |
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 615 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Blindness, Blind, (4) Pneumonia, (5) Flu, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Fever, (8) Worry, (9) Pain, (10) Redness. Of these terms, Blindness, Blind (n=31), Worry (n=16), Redness (n=12) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 1212 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Cardiac arrest, (4) Flu, (5) Poisoning, (6) Pain, (7) Fear, (8) Stress, (9) Cancer, (10) Pneumonia. Of these terms, Stress (n=41), Cancer (n=40) 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 “effect” 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 “anti” within the search for “Hydroxychloroquine” 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 can testify I was sick with covid for 8 days the last days were horrible and couldn’t breathe I went to dr and got prescribed ivermectin 4 hours later my lungs got better my shortness from breath decreased. Next day woke up feeling a lot better | ivermectin | Sickness |
| I’m on Infliximab and Aza, had COVID Xmas week. I had very high antibodies from my vaccinations (which I was surprised to have made). Second day of symptoms (cough and headache only) I received the monoclonal antibodies. 3 days later I was feeling amazingly better! | monoclonal antibodies | Coughing, Cough, Headache |
| I got the big scary J&J vaccine and had absolutely no side effects. No tiredness, no headaches, my arm wasn’t even sore. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Headache, Tiredness |
| i definitely prefer the sore arm to the persistent fever. the moderna vaccine gave me chills i’ve never experienced before :’) | moderna vaccine | Chills, Fever |
| PDF 29-year old…severe chest tightness, dyspnea and retrosternal pain…2 days after…Moderna 12-year old…severe stabbing chest pain, diarrhea and fever 2 days after…Comirnaty 17-year old…severe stabbing chest pain and fever 1 day aft…Comirnaty | pfizer vaccine | Chest pain, Chest tightness, Diarrhea, Fever, Pain |
| Sorry if this grosses anyone out, but is it a known issue to get diarrhea from the Pfizer vaccine? I got the booster yesterday & I’ve been having that, being sleepy, & feel like I’m on the verge of getting a headache, those last 2 I’m not surprised by. | pfizer vaccine | Diarrhea, Headache, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| Resting after my 3rd Moderna vaccine yesterday. The only symptoms I’m experiencing are fatigue & soreness. Thank heavens for Advil Extra Strength. Spending the rest of the evening, binge-watching . Good night everyone. <U+0001F451> <U+0001F4FA> | moderna vaccine | Fatigue |
| I have had hives twice in my life, but not since my Pfizer vaccine. Both episodes I did have were during extremely stressful times in my life. | pfizer vaccine | Hives, Stress |
| junkie Had J&J vaccine, no booster. Omicron lasted 8 days. Cold like or mild flu. Advil stopped fever and controlled body aches. Sore throat, runny nose, cough in the morning till coffee loosened it. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Ache, Coldness, Cold, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Flu, Runny nose, Sore throat |
| Thanks when first got my pfizer vaccine last year I only got sore arm and a fever and that was it but it only last 2 days the fever.
And that sucks you got a headache I hope it goes away soon. |
pfizer vaccine | Fever, Headache |
| Getting my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine tomorrow.
I’m having extreme anxiety rightnow, cuz I have a MASSIVE fear.of needles. But I know its for the greater good, so I just wanna get it over with. Also, I’ve never had a bad reaction to vaccines, ever. So, im good on that. |
pfizer vaccine | Anxiety |
| After recieving the teo shots of Moderna Vaccine, I became sicker and sicker the past few months. I had fever and so,like I never had in my entire life. <U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D> Ich glaube, ich sterbe gegen die Impfung <U+0001F62D> | moderna vaccine | Fever |
| Moderna Vaccine Update:
Day 0: Headache (mild) Day 1: Death warmed over Day 2: 100% Day 3: Feels like a hangover Comorbidity: Actually hungover because I felt so good on Day 2 that beers seemed like a good idea. |
moderna vaccine | Hangover, Headache |
| I had covid 2 weeks ago .. entire family got it wife is vaxed was down 4 days fever aches headache. I had high fever and extreme sore throat first evening.. took my first dose of ivermectin and I was framing my basement 8 hrs later.. it was crazy. Did lose taste smell | ivermectin | Ache, Fever, Headache, Sore throat |
| I have covid. Aside from being super sleepy I have had no symptoms since the fever and headache the first night. Taking ivermectin and all the legal supplements. Also taking NAC. This cold is a huge nothingburger | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Fever, Headache, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| I wonder if how many days did Hyunjin suffer from the side effects of Moderna vaccine coz my arm still hurts like hell, goodthing my headache is gone <U+0001F62D> | moderna vaccine | Headache |
| I had no side effects at all with my first two Biontec shots, but some fever and muscle pain after my booster with the Moderna vaccine. But everything was fine again after one day | moderna vaccine | Fever, Muscle pain, Pain |
| Goddamn the boost dose of Pfizer vaccine really got me <U+0001F602>, feeling so weak and my throat hurts a bit <U+0001F611> | pfizer vaccine | Weakness |
| I got the Pfizer vaccine in my left arm. My left leg was partially paralyzed for 3 days. Couldn’t swallow, my lymph nodes in my neck swelled to the point of choking me. Left side of my head went numb. I thought the ambulance would not get me in time. | pfizer vaccine | Choking, Neck swelling, Numbness, Paralyzed, Swelling |
| I took the J&J vaccine earlier today and now I’m feeling soo cold, I can’t stop shivering. <U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D> | johnson and johnson vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Shivers, Shivering |
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 24, 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.