There were 12,679 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 1,743 on Thursday, the 10th to 2,292 on Wednesday, the 9th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 6,753. Monoclonal antibodies had the fewest tweets this week with 481.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- The FDA needs more time to decide whether to authorize the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for children under 5 years old
- mRNA vaccines protection against Covid-19 related hospitalizations wanes over time, but remains strong after three doses, according to the CDC
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -19.67 for Remdesivir on Sunday the 6th to 19.96 for Moderna vaccine on Wednesday the 9th.
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. Blindness, Blind had the highest overall net sentiment of 4.54. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-39.66).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 352 | -5.48 |
| Sickness | 155 | -38.12 |
| Cancer | 93 | -39.66 |
| Flu | 88 | -18.24 |
| Fear | 73 | -28.54 |
| Pneumonia | 59 | -22.54 |
| Blindness, Blind | 56 | 4.54 |
| Coldness, Cold | 53 | -15.04 |
| Fall | 53 | 0.23 |
| Addiction | 44 | -16.70 |
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 388 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top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Flu, (3) Sickness, (4) Withdrawn, (5) Blindness, Blind, (6) MS, (7) Fall, (8) Fear, (9) Pneumonia, (10) Cancer. Of these terms, Withdrawn (n=18), MS (n=15) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 708 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) Fear, (5) Flu, (6) Allergic reaction, (7) Pneumonia, (8) Pain, (9) Poisoning, (10) Fever. Of these terms, Allergic reaction (n=32), Pain (n=23), Poisoning (n=23), Fever (n=21) 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 “earli” 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, “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 received the Pfizer vaccine for #3. I had a bad headache and was very tired. Lasted through the evening, but I woke up fine the next morning | pfizer vaccine | Headache |
| “Four hours after my first dose of Pfizer vaccine, I became extremely dizzy and disoriented. I had to lie down and close my eyes to keep from getting nauseous. Lasted through the night. I remained dizzy off and on for a week.” #realnotrare #teamhumanity | pfizer vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy, Nauseous |
| Zero. None. Nada. I had no side effects from the first or second shots either. I got the Pfizer vaccine. I got my flu shot & my shingles shot & the shingles shot really hurts and made me feel sick. But it’s much easier than having shingles. | pfizer vaccine | Feeling sick, Flu, Shingles, Sickness |
| Covid update: First evening was bad, sweated buckets overnight. Day 2: Started popping Ivermectin like Smarties, felt rough. Day 3: I’m fine, little achy, slight hangover vibe, but okay. Been chopping firewood, cooking etc. Might go for a run. | ivermectin | Hangover, Sweating |
| So first I got COVID. No big deal, I spent more time mad at my symptoms than “suffering.” My nephew gets Remdesivir infusions and brings home the flu to the family too. Feeling better so I shovel snow today. Maybe not the best idea. Nope. Pretty stupid, tbh. | remdesivir | Flu |
| My dad went this whole time, finally just caught Covid and had high fevers/major fatigue for a week, took ivermectin, out of bed instantly.. HORSE PASTE <U+0001F621><U+0001F621><U+0001F92C><U+0001F92C> | ivermectin | Fatigue |
| Wrong. Unvaxxed here. I got Covid and had a headache and a slight fever for a day. Did not miss a day of work (wfh). Vaxxed friends I know had severe symptoms and missed a week of work. Sunshine, exercise, vitamins C/D/zinc as Ivermectin saves the day. | ivermectin | Fever, Headache |
| _mccary Exactly my symptoms when I got Covid. I took Ivermectin, HCQ, Azithromycin, z-stack vitamins, Rx for coughs, ibuprofen, and nebulizer. I made certain I had plenty of Liquids on hand. Never got any worse and started improving immediately. | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough |
| i feel like i can talk about it since my face has cleared up, but this is what taking the #Pfizer vaccine did to my face and body. i broke out in hives all over- my face getting the worst of it. i didn’t want the vaccine in the first place, we should always have the choice | pfizer vaccine | Hives |
| I just recovered from covid. Unvaxxed and had mild symptoms. Felt like the flu. Ivermectin works wonders. | ivermectin | Flu |
| Well, my covid symptoms continue to be mild. Breathing is good. Energy so so. No headaches. Some congestion but today I noticed my taste and smell are gone. Not sure when that happened. I Did three days of ivermectin, I may do two more. | ivermectin | Headache |
| Yes, got the pfizer vaccine 2 times and boosted. My son tested positive Jan. 18, 2022 for Covid19. His symptoms included being Very congested, mild fever, body aches, head ache, and very weak for over a week. He also got the Pfizer vaccine in June and Sept. but wouldn’t get | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Fever, Weakness |
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: Feb 14, 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.