There were 17,576 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 2,078 on Saturday, the 29th to 3,593 on Tuesday, the 25th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 8,302. Johnson and johnson vaccine had the fewest tweets this week with 557.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- Protestors rallied against government mandates for Covid-19 vaccinations in Washington D.C.
- The Biden administration withdrew the private-sector vaccination mandate after it was blocked by the Supreme Court
- The EU lifted Covid-19 travel restriction for people traveling inside the bloc
- Pfizer and BioNTech are evaluating an adapted version of the Covid-19 vaccine that targets Omicron
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -26.44 for Remdesivir on Saturday the 29th to 47.37 for Moderna vaccine on Wednesday the 26th.
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. Flu had the highest overall net sentiment of 34.82. Cardiac arrest had the lowest net sentiment this week (-81.76).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 729 | -7.12 |
| Sickness | 256 | -28.34 |
| Flu | 226 | 34.82 |
| Cardiac arrest | 215 | -81.76 |
| Blindness, Blind | 106 | -22.05 |
| Pneumonia | 82 | -10.59 |
| Cancer | 74 | -38.45 |
| Coldness, Cold | 70 | 3.93 |
| Poisoning | 67 | -40.43 |
| Fear | 61 | -32.36 |
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 630 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Flu, (3) Sickness, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) Pneumonia, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Fever, (8) Worry, (9) MS, (10) Rosacea. Of these terms, Fever (n=19), Worry (n=15), MS (n=11), Rosacea (n=11) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 1113 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Cardiac arrest, (3) Sickness, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) Flu, (6) Poisoning, (7) Cancer, (8) Pneumonia, (9) Confused, Confusion, (10) Fear. Of these terms, Confused, Confusion (n=29) 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 “die” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Same My head hurts so bad I just recently got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine yesterday and today was the most worst day of my life I was find this morning then later in the morning my eyes was hurting really bad My head was hurting really bad I was having cold chills etc | pfizer vaccine | Chills, Coldness, Cold |
| Why would they give Remdesivir to a covid patient ?
Side effects of drug severe headache pounding in your neck or ears fast slow pounding heartbeat wheezing trouble breathing ! swelling in your face nausea fever chills or shivering; itching, sweating a light-headed feeling |
remdesivir | Chills, Fever, Fever chills, Headache, Itching, Light-headed, Nausea, Shivers, Shivering, Sweating, Swelling, Wheezing, Wheeze |
| Ahh! From the shingles vaccine?
When I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine I was sick for 4 days. When I got the Moderna Shot <U+0001F489> I was only tired for one day. |
johnson and johnson vaccine | Shingles, Sickness |
| i got the moderna vaccine and i had covid almost a year before it, i was sore and tired for 2 days and the 3rd day i had a fever and threw up (there was a little blood in it?) then i got omicron over christmas now im getting my second shot so im scared it’s gonna be intense? | moderna vaccine | Fever |
| _Trades I must have been lucky. I only had a slight cough and felt sleepy all the time. I have the Moderna vaccine. | moderna vaccine | Coughing, Cough, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| Got my first Moderna vaccine on Sat (I was holding off until I finished the Patterson Protocol) & have been bed bound since. Waking up drenched in sweat, fever and severe neck pain coming from the right arm where I got the vax. Can move my neck well but hoping this is temporary! | moderna vaccine | Fever, Neck pain, Pain, Sweating |
| I’ve had Covid like symptoms since last Thursday evening. Have the Pfizer vaccine (two shots) . Thursday evening was the worst. Crazy chills, fever, muscle aches, balance was off, coughing. I’ve been able to decrease my ibuprofen intake and starting to feel better now. | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Chills, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Muscle ache |
| Im on day 3 of covid treatment. The morning after the first dose of ivermectin I felt 90% better. Somehow Covid really effected my electrolytes so on day 2 I felt really bad again with body aches and dehydration. Head hurts today, but no crushing headache finally. | ivermectin | Ache, Dehydration, Headache |
| Oooofffff … that was a bad night. I reacted far more strongly to the Moderna booster than to either Pfizer vaccine last summer. I’m glad it means my immune system’s done the work! And it so completely beats having Covid! But god I’m sooooooooooo stiff and achey! | pfizer vaccine | Stiffness |
| We are pretty lit up & um -I am pretty sure That I became ignited as of Tuesday <U+0001F62D>I had Pfizer vaccine & P booster & I’ve been careful but somehow I managed 2 get sick. <U+0001F629>I’ve had body aches, chills, sore-ish throat & sinus pain w/drippy nose. I’m a bit better but sucks 2 get it | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Chills, Pain, Sickness, Sinusitis, Sinus pain |
| I had 3 vaxes, got a bad case of COVID. The monoclonal antibodies helped, but I am still sick after 3 weeks. And exhausted. I wish I had never seen a vax and just stayed home like the previous 2 years where I never got sick! | monoclonal antibodies | Exhaustion, Sickness |
| I tested negative today after testing positive a week ago! I’m very thankful for the Moderna vaccine, because the symptoms were mostly mild. I never even had a fever; it was basically like a cold, except the fatigue was pretty intense at first. | moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Fatigue, Fever |
| Yes, but after both Moderna vaccine shots. Was like a bad cold with sore throat for 4 days.
So thankful I had those shots! |
moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Sore throat |
| I finally got Covid, woke up with body aches. Took ivermectin and feeling good by noon. It works | ivermectin | Ache |
| After receiving the second dose of vaccine yesterday, I became suffering from fatigue, pain in the head and neck and a feeling of inactivity! #coronavirus | pfizer vaccine | Fatigue, Pain |
| Covid journey: started w shivers, head and body aches week one. Appetite and taste buds off. Week 2 was the cough and soaked sheets, and appetite meh. Week 3 : cough abated. Ivermectin last 12 days, z pak this week, 10 days rx cough pill. | ivermectin | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Shivers, Shivering |
| I’ve had ~6 weeks-lung infections in past 2 yrs FINALLY got FIRST dose of the homebound Pfizer vaccine end of Dec. Had to reschedule 2nd dose bc I was sick that day after hubby’s coworker tested pos 4 Omicron. Yet what felt like ANOTHER bad infection coming on was gone in 3 days! | pfizer vaccine | Infection, Lung infection, Sickness |
| I got two doses of Pfizer vaccine, then the booster on the 10th of January this year, went out for dinner on the 21st, by the evening of the 25th I’m coughing, yesterday the 26th in between feeling like death, I drag myself to get tested, why tf do I have covid?! I’m livid! | pfizer vaccine | Coughing, Cough |
| Absolutely no bad effects from my J&J vaccine. No injection pain, no soreness afterward, zero side effects.
Sore shoulder for several days from my Moderna booster. Nothing else. |
johnson and johnson vaccine | Pain |
| #Clapton shut up. My feet, fingers, toes & are still going numb after horrible Pfizer vaccine. I have asthma & felt I had to take it. | pfizer vaccine | Asthma, Numbness |
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: Feb 01, 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.