There were 9,905 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 1,130 on Tuesday, the 15th to 1,858 on Saturday, the 19th. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 5,218. Monoclonal antibodies had the fewest tweets this week with 353.
Covid-19 in the news this week
- A study published by the CDC reported that babies born to mothers who were vaccinated against Covid-19 while pregnant were 61% less likely to be hospitalized for Covid-19 Newly reported Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. are starting to decline as the Omicron variant surge fades
- The Omicron variant is overwhelming the healthcare system in Hong Kong; officials are considering citywide testing, a strategy already in use in mainland China
- The FDA delayed its review of the Pfizer vaccine for children under 5 because initial results indicated poor performance of the vaccine against the Omicron variant
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -23.21 for Remdesivir on Friday the 18th to 17.6 for Moderna vaccine on Thursday the 17th.
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 10.34. Inflammation had the lowest net sentiment this week (-46.1).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 254 | -11.49 |
| Disease progression | 193 | 7.51 |
| Inflammation | 149 | -46.10 |
| Sickness | 112 | -39.61 |
| Flu | 50 | -21.21 |
| Cancer | 48 | -41.44 |
| Blindness, Blind | 46 | 10.34 |
| Pneumonia | 45 | -10.75 |
| Coldness, Cold | 40 | 3.96 |
| Poisoning | 37 | -29.52 |
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 357 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Disease progression, (2) Infection, (3) Coldness, Cold, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) Sickness, (6) Pneumonia, (7) Inflammation, (8) Forgetfulness, (9) Cancer, (10) Coughing, Cough. Of these terms, Forgetfulness (n=11), Coughing, Cough (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 639 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Inflammation, (2) Infection, (3) Sickness, (4) Disease progression, (5) Cancer, (6) Kidney failure, (7) Flu, (8) Poisoning, (9) Pneumonia, (10) Pain. Of these terms, Kidney failure (n=26), Pain (n=18) 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 “medicin” 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.
The 25 most important words within negative tweets (compared to positive and neutral) tweets are shown in the treemap below. The word “heart” within the search for “Pfizer vaccine” 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 got my first shot of the Pfizer Vaccine yesterday (yes, I know I’m late to the party) and I feel like absolute crap this morning. I’m fatigued, my arm is sore, and my head is killing me. I’m nervous about the second shot now. | pfizer vaccine | Fatigue, Nervousness, Nervous |
| I had covid in December and I took Ivermectin and 3 days I was feeling better . 1st day headache, stuffy nose , cough , muscle aches, could not get out of bed . 2nd day feeling better, 3rd day symptoms were almost gone 4th back to normal. | ivermectin | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Headache, Muscle ache |
| BRO THE SECOND DOZE OF THE MODERNA VACCINE GAVE ME A WHOLE FUCKING MONTH OF AGONIZING COLDS AND MADE ME BEDRIDDEN FOR A WHOLE ASS DAY AIN’T DOIN THIS SHIT NO MORE FR I’M TIRED | moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold |
| I had a horrible reaction to the J&J vaccine. Leg swelling from knee up the thigh. Developed cellulitis in arm. Took months, drugs and many doctor visits. Now, almost 10 months later, I’m getting back to normal. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Cellulitis, Swelling |
| I’ve gotten severe insomnia each time i’ve gotten the pfizer vaccine. Didn’t happen with moderna. I end up with a few weeks where it takes me 4-6 hours to fall asleep and i wake up every 1.5 hours with intense dreams. Then it tapers off to just not sleeping much and feeling it | pfizer vaccine | Fall, Insomnia |
| Current status of 3rd vaxx being a different one (comirnaty vs moderna): – Got no itchiness rash – barely any swelling/soreness in vaxx place – body went actually cold instead of fevers – very mild headaches and soreness – 2nd day sleepiness – low appetite on 2nd day | pfizer vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Fever, Headache, Itchy, Itchy rash, Rash, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| Glad you got over Covid. You just had milder symptoms from it like I did. I just had the loss of taste and smell thing. No Ivermectin for me tho I got jabbed | ivermectin | Loss of taste |
| I had the horrible Pfizer vaccine it made my hands-free fingers and toes go numb with screaming pain that was back in March and still ongoing. I had the Moderna no issues with it at all. sorry you got sick. | pfizer vaccine | Numbness, Pain, Screaming, Sickness |
| I ended up getting Covid, didn’t need the Ivermectin. I didnt even know i had it, thought i gad s cold. It wasnt until my wife felt my foregead and said ‘you feel warm. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| I recently had Covid, even though I got the Pfizer vaccine. Just waiting for the all clear, so I can get back to work. Aside from the loss of smell and taste, just felt like a cold. | pfizer vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Loss of smell |
| Has anyone had like…residual side affects from the moderna vaccine?
My lymph nodes, under my left arm (where I got the shot) were swollen for a few days after. It started off as a minor itch but picked up on a bit more pain…eventually went away. I’d say about a week later. | moderna vaccine | Itching, Pain |
| Got Moderna booster yesterday. Running a 100.5° fever with body aches today. I was 11 months post my 2x Moderna vax but had Covid back in November plus monoclonal antibodies. | monoclonal antibodies | Ache, Fever |
| Got the Pfizer vaccine … had excruciating pain in groin and left leg for 4 weeks … and numbness in left hip <U+0001F601> | pfizer vaccine | Numbness, Pain |
| _79 I’ve had 8+ bouts of shingles, on my face each time. Starting at 22 years old. Always stress induced. I’ll happily take multiple additional relapses before i ever consider the vaccine.
Oddly enough, i haven’t had even a trace of nerve pain since taking ivermectin for covid… | ivermectin | Nerve pain, Pain, Shingles, Stress |
| My husband got bellspalsy after his second dose of Pfizer vaccine. His left side of face was droopy,eye constantly itching and burning he had slurred speech.He had that for 6 months I know .we went to ER THOUGHT HE WAD HAVING A STROKE | pfizer vaccine | Burn, Itching, Stroke |
| i just got my 2nd dose of moderna vaccine today therefore i will be spending my whole Valentines Day sick and dead. if anybody needs me just know that i’ll be alone and probably shivering on my bed. <U+0001F44D><U+0001F3FC> | moderna vaccine | Shivers, Shivering, Sickness |
| It’s still trying to me. The 2nd Moderna vaccine I had. I am still sick from it. | moderna vaccine | Sickness |
| Got Covid 11/20 no symptoms. Got the Pfizer vaccine 3/21 made me sick. Got Covid again 1/22 sore throat and a fever. The medication they gave me was Paxlovid and it made me sick to the point I was running 105.2 temp and was in the ER for 27 hours. The cure is worse than disease | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Sickness, Sore throat |
| I don’t talk about it because I always think I’ll get dragged, but after my second Moderna vaccine, i had experienced circulation issues in my leg. Also chest pain.. | moderna vaccine | Chest pain, Pain |
| I hope you continue to stand up for your right to live your life naturally and healthy. I’ve taken the Pfizer vaccine and I haven’t been the same. I suffer from headaches daily, nausea daily, eye trouble and a few other things. I wish I never took the vaccine! | pfizer vaccine | Headache, Nausea |
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 21, 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.