There were 9,005 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 772 on Saturday, the 26th to 2,034 on Tuesday, the 22nd. Ivermectin had the most tweets this week with 5,645. Monoclonal antibodies had the fewest tweets this week with 272.
Visit DrugVisual Covid Twitter dashboard
Covid-19 in the news this week
- New US COVID guidelines allow most Americans to go mask-free
- Queen Elizabeth tests positive for Covid-19
- Moderna says Covid is entering an endemic phase, but annual vaccines will be needed
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -37.36 for Remdesivir on Saturday the 26th to 22.7 for Monoclonal antibodies on Friday the 25th.
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. Coldness, Cold had the highest overall net sentiment of 9.95. Fear had the lowest net sentiment this week (-39.54).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 202 | -8.47 |
| Sickness | 73 | -36.06 |
| Disease progression | 65 | 0.45 |
| Flu | 51 | -24.32 |
| Blindness, Blind | 43 | 6.53 |
| Cancer | 41 | -37.51 |
| Coldness, Cold | 41 | 9.95 |
| Forgetfulness | 41 | -16.63 |
| Fear | 38 | -39.54 |
| Pneumonia | 35 | -7.03 |
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 241 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Coldness, Cold, (3) Blindness, Blind, (4) Flu, (5) Disease progression, (6) Pneumonia, (7) Sickness, (8) Forgetfulness, (9) MS, (10) Worry. Of these terms, MS (n=7), Worry (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 458 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Flu, (4) Fear, (5) Cancer, (6) Forgetfulness, (7) Allergy, (8) Heart attack, (9) Food allergy, (10) Pneumonia. Of these terms, Allergy (n=21), Heart attack (n=21), Food allergy (n=17) 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 “reaction” within the search for “Moderna 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 had trouble too. Just wanted to sleep. The reaction I am having from the second dose of Moderna vaccine is kicking my ass. Really tired, sore arm and nauseous. | moderna vaccine | Nauseous |
| In the interest of full disclosure, here are the side effects I experienced after each Pfizer vaccine dose:
#1: mild chills, mild headache, only lasted few hrs #2: Mild chills, mild headache, sleepiness (~12 hrs). One reddish urination #3: Mild chills, only lasted a few hours |
pfizer vaccine | Chills, Headache, Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| This headache the Pfizer vaccine gives me feels weird. Like, it doesn’t hurt but it feels like I have a sore head. My head literally feels the way I felt after my car accident. <U+0001F927> | pfizer vaccine | Headache |
| Y’all I feel AWFUL My first and second doses of the pfizer vaccine last year went fine, arm was sore and was a bit tired I got a HALF dose of Moderna yesterday and I WANT TO DIE I don’t need Elden Ring anymore, I’m getting bodied by the minute | pfizer vaccine | Feels awful |
| Really tired,Pfizer vaccine. The whole team has a fever. It’s giving me a headache let’s go to sleep.<U+0001F634> Good night JG and JG’s angel,have a sweet dreams.<U+0001F607><U+0001F607><U+0001F607><U+0001F49D><U+0001F49D><U+0001F49D> #FlowerOfEvil #JoonGi #Chaewon | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Headache |
| I’ve had covid 2x…not once have i been to a hospital. First round took ivermectin, got from Dr online! Did awesome, was sick for about 4 days, second round 1 day fever and a bit sore.. I’m perfectly fine. | ivermectin | Fever, Sickness |
| Ive been triple-vaxed with pfizer-comirnaty. And i havent been the same since. Ever since ive felt constantly exhausted. | pfizer vaccine | Exhaustion |
| Literally was prescribed Ivermectin by my doctor when I had covid (and my fever was lingering as it came back after several days of feeling better).
It absolutely made me feel better, and quickly. I was skeptical before, but it absolutely worked. |
ivermectin | Fever |
| I’m still suffering from a months-long debilitating reaction to my Pfizer vaccine. If I gave the vaccine to my children and they endured the ER visits, pain, dozens of blood draws, and suffering I have, I’d never, ever, forgive myself. | pfizer vaccine | Pain |
| I’ve had covid 2 times now, im in my 40s, I went online seen a Dr through maple, got ivermectin from the pharmacy, and had zero issues, second time 3 weeks ago, had a fever bit of a sore body for 1 day, took motrin, still fine. | ivermectin | Fever |
| I can’t believe pfizer vaccine knocked me down like this. My arm hurts like hell and I’m having fever :(( | pfizer vaccine | Fever |
| Since taking the J&J vaccine last year, I get this terrible flu every 2 months consistently. I regret taking the jab<U+0001F62D> | johnson and johnson vaccine | Flu |
| #GetBoostedWearMasks I received Moderna vaccine in March & April ’21. I caught the variant 2-3 weeks ago. Some weakness one day & a runny nose 2 days. That’s it. I’m 64. I feel like that is saying something. I got my Moderna booster Monday 2/21/22. I wear a mask <U+0001F637> 100% <U+0001F44D><U+0001F3FB><U+0001F44D><U+0001F3FB> | moderna vaccine | Runny nose, Weakness |
| _Pale_H0rse I just got the 3rd dose of the Pfizer vaccine yesterday and I’m hella sick from it. I hear omicron would be easier than this. Not that I’d change my decision but how annoying. | pfizer vaccine | Pale, Sickness |
| This Pfizer booster shot is so much more chilled than the J&J vaccine. The J&J had me shivering all night and sleeping for two days. All I’ve had so far with the booster is a sore arm | johnson and johnson vaccine | Chills, Shivers, Shivering |
| Wellllll. I’m sure you guys are going to jump on me for saying this. But I got pulmonary embolisms 2 weeks and a day after my second dose of the moderna vaccine. Have never gotten COVID, knock on wood, and still got boosted. But im on warfarin for the rest of my life. … | moderna vaccine | Embolism, Pulmonary embolism |
| The cure to the covid headaches and sore throat that have been permanent since Wednesday seems to be two zapain and a vocalzone (every singer’s favourite weed-smelling-throat-sweet). The other lot can keep their ivermectin, I’m getting high! | ivermectin | Headache, Sore throat |
| Guys? I think the Pfizer vaccine is alive in my body and it’s giving me severe stomach cramps <U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D> | pfizer vaccine | Cramp, Stomach cramps |
| _NIAMS I developed New Food Allergies after getting the Moderna Vaccine. Reaction to Food Allergies became progressively Worse as 2nd Moderna shot and Booster, was NEAR FATAL Reaction. I never had Allergic reactions to any fruit prior. | moderna vaccine | Allergic reaction, Allergy, Food allergy |
| I developed New Food Allergies after getting the Moderna Vaccine. Reaction to Food Allergies became progressively Worse as 2nd Moderna shot and Booster, was NEAR FATAL Reaction. I never had Allergic reactions to any fruit prior. | moderna vaccine | Allergic reaction, Allergy, Food allergy |
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 28, 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.