There were 9,589 unique tweets. The number of tweets on a given day ranged from 724 on Sunday, the 27th to 2,099 on Tuesday, the 1st. Pfizer vaccine had the most tweets this week with 6,191. Monoclonal antibodies had the fewest tweets this week with 202.
Visit DrugVisual Covid Twitter dashboard
Covid-19 in the news this week
- ‘COVID zero’ regions struggle with vaccine complacency
- CDC estimates 140 million US Covid-19 infections
- NFL, NFLPA agree to suspend joint COVID-19 protocols
- WHO: COVID-19 pandemic triggers 25% increase in prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide
- China Reports Most New Daily Covid Cases in More Than Two Months
- WebMD: Long COVID Patients May Develop Nerve Damage: Study
- Reuters: WHO recommends Merck’s COVID pill for high-risk patients
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -33.43 for Remdesivir on Sunday the 27th to 14.6 for Pfizer vaccine on Monday the 28th.
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. Infection had the highest overall net sentiment of 5.48. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-50.1).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 491 | 5.48 |
| Sickness | 62 | -38.05 |
| Cancer | 61 | -46.82 |
| Blindness, Blind | 49 | 4.38 |
| Poisoning | 47 | -50.10 |
| Worry | 39 | -7.38 |
| Flu | 38 | -38.26 |
| Pain | 37 | -34.57 |
| Fear | 30 | -36.39 |
| Fever | 30 | -33.80 |
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 368 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Blindness, Blind, (3) Worry, (4) Sickness, (5) Coldness, Cold, (6) Fall, (7) MS, (8) Fear, (9) Cancer, (10) Wound. Of these terms, Coldness, Cold (n=9), Fall (n=9), MS (n=9), Wound (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 486 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) Poisoning, (5) Pain, (6) Fever, (7) Flu, (8) Fear, (9) Heart attack, (10) Worry. Of these terms, Heart attack (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 “old” within the search for “Pfizer vaccine” 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 “fatal” within the search for “Pfizer vaccine” 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 got the Pfizer vaccine and I had parathesia down the entire left side of my body. From the top of my head to my feet. Pins and needles and burning like my body was in an oven. It lasted 4 weeks 🙁 my arm would fall asleep randomly for weeks and I couldn’t close my hands | pfizer vaccine | Burn, Fall, Pins and needles |
| 3 doses of Pfizer Comirnaty® and felt fine. 1 dose of Moderna Spikevax!® (exclamation point added by me, but really it should have it, makes it “cooler”) It’s put on my ass, which in a weird way makes me feel better. Arm really sore, chills, tired and general aches and pains. | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Chills, Pain |
| Got the booster yesterday. Trying to take it easy today. My body’s reaction to the Pfizer vaccine so far has been deep muscle pain in my neck/shoulders & lethargy for a week. This is Moderna, so hoping it’s not so bad. | pfizer vaccine | Lethargy, Muscle pain, Pain |
| I am still not boosted because of the Johnson Johnson vaccine situation here but I swear the moment I am and the situation dies down a bit again I am on my way!!! <U+0001F97A><U+0001F97A> I miss you so much I will cry istg | johnson and johnson vaccine | Crying |
| I got my Pfizer vaccine ,2nd dose and when I say I didn’t see my period for 2 months ? Yho I was stressed bathong lona <U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D><U+0001F62D> | pfizer vaccine | Stress |
| been experiencing constant heart palpitations and chest pain ever since i had the moderna vaccine my anxiety is going insane rn do i really have to live like this the rest of my life i didnt even feel comfortable getting the shot in the firstplace buthad to becauseit wasmandatory | moderna vaccine | Anxiety, Chest pain, Pain, Palpitations |
| Having side effects after taking my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. High fever and my left arm is tender. But it’s all for the best <U+0001F489><U+0001F90D> grateful <U+0001F607><U+0001F97A> | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Tenderness |
| Too bad you needed more studies before you would take ivermectin or HCQ. Covid was a 1 day headache for me with some mild fatigue, thanks to IVM. Back to an hour of cardio every day on day 14. I actually feel amazingly better than I did before, and I’m 56. | ivermectin | Fatigue, Headache |
| I had the Pfizer vaccine and developed type 1 diabetes and I had diabetic keto acidosis along with being diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease. Shoulda never got it. I’ve had good health all my life until this. I’m ready to beat someone’s ass | pfizer vaccine | Diabetic, Diabetes |
| _2022 As soon as 2 wks ago i got positive test ( not 2 bad, high fever, headache, im unvaxd) i gave my hubby ivermectin.He is overweight, high bloodsugar, high bloodpressure etc. 36 hrs later in the evening his fever rose. In the morning it was gone. He slept thru his covid. Literally. | ivermectin | Fever, Headache, Overweight |
| I hadn’t been worried up until one time last August, I got one shot of Moderna vaccine. Eight days later I had Covid! Very mild. My doctor told me that the shot had lowered my immunity. My natural immunity had given me protection all along. I’m eighty eight. No more shots. | moderna vaccine | Worry |
| Japan doesn’t recognize my J&J vaccine from last year. Have to get two full Moderna doses before I can get boosted. Left arm hurts like hell and based on the fact I passed out from a fever from my first vaccine I don’t imagine my second (*third) shot is gonna go much better | johnson and johnson vaccine | Fever, Passed out |
| _875 I’m confused I have the j & j vaccine that’s good right? That only has one dose. Like do I need the booster too. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Confused, Confusion |
| heard a bunch of people complain about how painful and feverish the Pfizer vaccine is, so yesterday when I went for my 3rd (Booster) dose, I opted for it (Pfizer) instead of Sinopharm I took last year, I think there’s a little bit exaggeration if how I feel is how they feel, lol | pfizer vaccine | Feverish, Pain |
|
Not my doctor called me after hours just to tell me what everybody but Cleveland Clinic knew…..I had a severe allergic reaction to the Moderna vaccine I’m now exempt from the second dose <U+0001F643> |
moderna vaccine | Allergic reaction |
| My family and I had the Pfizer vaccine and our symptoms were the same as flue vaccine, body aches and slight fever for 24 hrs. | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Fever |
| The Moderna vaccine was cross-vaccinated. The body temperature before inoculation was 35.9 <U+2103>, and the body temperature 22 hours after inoculation was 35.8 <U+2103>. Arm muscle pain is ongoing but there are no serious side reactions. | moderna vaccine | Muscle pain, Pain |
| damn i didn’t get sick from my first and second dose of the moderna vaccine and now i didn’t get sick from the booster… is that shit even working on me <U+0001F9CD><U+0001F3FE><U+200D><U+2640><U+FE0F><U+0001F9CD><U+0001F3FE><U+200D><U+2640><U+FE0F> | moderna vaccine | Sickness |
|
I had the first wave of COVID in November of 2020. I survived. Doctor gave me Hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, and Zinc. In any case, I need to research #LongCovid I understand most of the symptoms are hard to validate, which I like<U+0001F44C><U+0001F3FB> I’m lethargic Can’t concentrate Etc. |
hydroxychloroquine | Lethargic |
| #VaccineSideEffects I have been in excruciating pain since my 2nd Pfizer vaccine. 6+ mons later It’s a long list of neurological issues, small fiber neuropathy, 2 autonomic dysfunctions & full blown Mono but those are only a few of the diagnosis so far. My 5 yr old needs her mom! | pfizer vaccine | Pain |
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: Mar 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.