There were 25,587 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 2,050 on Saturday, the 5th to 6,553 on Tuesday, the 1st. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 16,659. Johnson and Johnson vaccine had the fewest tweets this week with 449.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine received full FDA approval for adults 18 years and older
- Pfizer and BioNTech are seeking FDA authorization for children under 5 years old, the only age group that does not have access to the vaccine
- A study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology reported that menstrual cycles were extended by less than one day, on average, in participants who were vaccinated against Covid-19 by either the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -24.99 for Remdesivir on Friday the 4th to 26.96 for Moderna vaccine on Thursday the 3rd.
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. Inflammation had the highest overall net sentiment of 35.18. Fear had the lowest net sentiment this week (-45.63).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 687 | -3.40 |
| Sickness | 289 | -30.42 |
| Inflammation | 172 | 35.18 |
| Coldness, Cold | 142 | 6.16 |
| Flu | 142 | -17.97 |
| Blindness, Blind | 134 | 2.17 |
| Cancer | 125 | -35.23 |
| Poisoning | 95 | -39.56 |
| Pneumonia | 71 | -25.66 |
| Fear | 59 | -45.63 |
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 806 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Inflammation, (3) Coldness, Cold, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) Sickness, (6) Flu, (7) Cancer, (8) Fall, (9) Overdose, (10) Withdrawn. Of these terms, Fall (n=14), Overdose (n=14), Withdrawn (n=14) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 1108 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Cancer, (4) Flu, (5) Poisoning, (6) Blindness, Blind, (7) Pneumonia, (8) Coldness, Cold, (9) Pain, (10) Rigors. Of these terms, Pain (n=33), Rigors (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 “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 |
|---|---|---|
| I’m living proof that Ivermectin works! I’ve been fighting covid for the last 4 days. I’ve been battling headaches, fever, chills, body aches and sore throat. I took Ivm for the first time literally 5 hours ago, and I feel like a new person. Everything gone except sore throat! | ivermectin | Ache, Chills, Fever, Fever chills, Headache, Sore throat |
| Never felt anything like that 2nd Moderna vaccine, I really wondered if I was going to die. Uncontrollable shivering with a fever, chest pains, heart rate up, pounding headache on a scale never felt, the feeling of “floating” disconnected from my body. Crazy, crazy experience. | moderna vaccine | Chest pain, Fever, Headache, Pain, Shivers, Shivering |
| ooouggg….got the moderna vaccine yesterday (originally had the j&j) and its kicking my aaaassssss <U+0001F635><U+200D><U+0001F4AB> not sleepy moreso than i just feel like a weak lil animal | moderna vaccine | Sleepiness, Sleepy, Weakness |
| Me<U+0001F60A> Sort of …I had the J & J vaccine (no side effects except fatigue for 18 hours – best nightmare sleep ever! – and a sore arm) followed by the Pfizer booster (left arm, flu shot right arm – same time … only sore arms<U+0001F609>)! #GetVaccinatedNow #Booster #protectyourselfandothers | johnson and johnson vaccine | Fatigue, Flu, Nightmare, Nightmares |
| My Pfizer booster didn’t hit me as hard as the Moderna vaccine I had twice before.
With Moderna, I had a sore arm and felt sluggish for a few days. Had my Pfizer booster the day before yesterday, and only had one day feeling sore and sluggish. #GetVaccinated #COVID19 |
moderna vaccine | Sluggishness |
| This virus defies science. I had all 3 vaccine shots. 3 days after the booster I got covid really bad. Took Hydroxychloroquine for 5 days. After day 3 all symptoms were gone. I was choking on mucus I was trying to cough up. Americasfrontlinedoctors saved my life. | hydroxychloroquine | Choking, Coughing, Cough |
| I only felt like dookie for two days, but it was just a bad headache. On top of that, I’ve been super tired.
When I got the J&J vaccine in August, it actually gave me a fever for a few days. Whatever your feeling is temporary. |
johnson and johnson vaccine | Fever, Headache |
| got my belated first dose of the moderna vaccine yesterday (long story but i was in a covid vaccine trial last January that didn’t end up getting approved) and today i am COLD i am SORE and i am desperate for a LONG NAP | moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold |
| News update: I took the moderna vaccine reinforcement 2 days ago and I’m currently dealing with a sore throat and a never ending headache. | moderna vaccine | Headache, Sore throat |
| 24 hours post booster pfizer vaccine. No fatigue, No headache. i dont feel sleepy, dont feel starving, dont feel anything. Just sore arm!! | pfizer vaccine | Fatigue, Headache, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| Well I officially have #COVID19 ! Had one shot J&J vaccine. So far hasn’t been that bad. Think it started 10 days ago mimicking a head cold that went away basically in 2 days then sorta laid dormant until it got into my lungs and I woke up with a soaking wet t-shirt this morning. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Coldness, Cold |
| I couldn’t shake my 103 Covid fever so I started Ivermectin on day 5. The morning after my first dose the fever was gone and I started recovering. Not a crazy high dose. It was just a low 5 day course of Ivermectin. I am thankful I was able to get it. Too bad everyone can’t | ivermectin | Fever, Shaking |
| _Wheeler I’m not taking it unless I’m forced. I had covid in November. It was ugly I got pretty sick but fortunately I overcame. Got rest took all the recommended vitamins and hydroxychloroquine from my doctor on top of a z pack cause i got a sinus infection. | hydroxychloroquine | Infection, Sickness, Sinus infection, Sinusitis |
| I got booster doze on day before yesterday of Pfizer vaccine. From yesterday I am feeling pain in body and continues headache. For how much the same conditions remain. | pfizer vaccine | Headache, Pain |
| I am immunocompromised and I went P/P/M, within half an hour of the Moderna vaccine, I had a fever, later in the day, the pain in my arm was more than I had with Pfizer, I had night sweats, a body ache, fever and a slight headache, I slept a lot for about two and a half days. | moderna vaccine | Ache, Fever, Headache, Night sweats, Pain, Sweating |
| My #LongCovid symptoms worsened after my Johnson & Johnson vaccine in July 2021 I have chronic pain in my legs and back and I am fatigued, grumpy and just miserable. I’m definitely not getting any booster vaccine. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Chronic pain, Fatigue, Pain |
| There is a human version of Ivermectin that has been used for decades; and no I haven’t taken anything and I’ve had COVID twice. The worst time was last December and then recently and it was gone in 2 to 3 days I only had a sore throat; well also a pretty bad headache. | ivermectin | Headache, Sore throat |
| I got booster dose of Pfizer vaccine Yesterday<U+06D4> It’s very painful injection compared to Astra Zenica<U+06D4> Feeling fever and bodyach since I got booster dose<U+06D4> | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Pain |
| Hi everyone. Can you pls pray for me. I’m in the Emergency department following my Pfizer vaccine. I feel emotionally okay as I have the sweet lord with me but physically exhausted. I had chest pain and a mini seizure this am. I have psalm 91 with me. Thanks all love Ingrid | pfizer vaccine | Chest pain, Exhaustion, Pain, Seizure |
| I took it when I had covid really sick before I took Ivermectin started getting better after taking. | ivermectin | Sickness |
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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- 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 07, 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.