Visit DrugVisual Covid Twitter dashboard
Covid-19 in the news this week
- Reuters: WHO recommends Merck’s COVID pill for high-risk patients
- WebMD: COVID’s Global Death Toll May Be 3 Times Official Numbers
- The Guardian: One-third of all US child Covid deaths occurred during Omicron surge
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -29.56 for Remdesivir on Thursday the 10th to 16.01 for Monoclonal antibodies on Monday the 7th.
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 -0.64. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-59.17).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 205 | -11.87 |
| Sickness | 65 | -33.04 |
| Cancer | 55 | -49.33 |
| Poisoning | 51 | -59.17 |
| Flu | 49 | -24.55 |
| Blindness, Blind | 46 | -0.64 |
| Cardiac arrest | 44 | -54.07 |
| Heart attack | 35 | -50.57 |
| Coldness, Cold | 34 | -8.76 |
| Forgetfulness | 29 | -7.71 |
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 188 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Blindness, Blind, (3) Flu, (4) Sickness, (5) Coldness, Cold, (6) Forgetfulness, (7) Coughing, Cough, (8) MS, (9) Cancer, (10) Heart attack. Of these terms, Coughing, Cough (n=7), MS (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 465 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Poisoning, (3) Cardiac arrest, (4) Cancer, (5) Sickness, (6) Heart attack, (7) Flu, (8) Pain, (9) Blindness, Blind, (10) Fear. Of these terms, Pain (n=18), Fear (n=15) 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 “everi” within the search for “Remdesivir” 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 “paid” within the search for “Remdesivir” 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 feel your pain. I’ve experienced hair loss and leg cramps/pains from the Moderna vaccine <U+0001F489> so frustrating! It was just starting to get better for me, but I had to get the booster last week and so now it’s getting worse again <U+0001F622> | moderna vaccine | Frustration, Hair loss, Pain |
| Idouble vaxxed, got covid at geoup event (102 fever warned me), immediately got monoclonal antibodies, continued working at home without side effects just mild cold symptoms, wife and I slept in separate bedrooms for 2 weeks, got booster after 6 weeks (I think), been feeling fine | monoclonal antibodies | Coldness, Cold, Cold symptoms, Fever |
| I had my Pfizer vaccine last year and I became sick that even at work they released me. When I came back with doctors note that started I reacted to the vaccine ,they said its not that deep yet they saw me vomiting with severe headache & crying of pain. I’m not taking the booster | pfizer vaccine | Crying, Headache, Pain, Sickness, Vomiting |
| _Joshi One of my friends had covid and felt tired for a couple of days. Later he had moderna vaccine and it made him extremely ill, headaches, felt sick and had 2 weeks off work. | moderna vaccine | Headache, Sickness |
| Oddly enough, I never got sick after I had my two Moderna vaccine shots, it was only the booster.
Just felt like making that observation. |
moderna vaccine | Sickness |
| My wings today were near perfect but this 4th Pfizer vaccine has me sweating and sluggish I said oh why am I still cute though <U+0001F914> | pfizer vaccine | Sluggishness, Sweating |
| I’ve been experiencing a drastic increase in sweating since the Pfizer vaccine, both in terms of how severe I sweat and when I’m likely to begin sweating. Can’t eat a meal without profuse sweats; can hardly exercise either. Sweat off my head currently dripping. | pfizer vaccine | Sweating |
| I lost my sense of taste and smell when I had covid in October, my symptoms got bad fast. I started showing early signs of covid pneumonia so I got my hands on ivermectin. I was better in three days time. | ivermectin | Pneumonia |
| Day 2 Comirnaty side effects: <U+2460>Woke up with pain all over my body, like Asuka just smacked me down in the WWE arena <U+2461>Sore throat and dizziness | pfizer vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy, Pain, Sore throat |
| Damn the Moderna vaccine got he hard on the side effects body ache headaches chills hopefully I can get better took a Tylenol | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Headache |
| I took ivermectin and got better in three days. I had headaches for a while after though. I’m all sickly too. One of my brothers who’s like never had a health problem in his life has long Covid. He’s gotten a bit of brain fog and some weird stomach stuff and breathing stuff. | ivermectin | Headache, Sickness |
| I got the Pfizer vaccine, and I was fine after the first dose. The second dose gave me severe insomnia for a month. | pfizer vaccine | Insomnia |
| My dumb previous hematologist ignored a small staph infection in my forearm. Got J&J vaccine and it exploded over my body. Thought I had Ebola. 9 months of Prednisone triggered type 2 diabetes…so you know. Things are shit. And I’m discouraged with writing. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Diabetic, Diabetes, Infection |
| Did not feel well for about 24 hours (started 6 hours after getting my J&J vaccine)- feverish, body aches, like a flu. Gone by the next day! <U+0001F605> No symptoms after getting the booster though. <U+0001F64C><U+0001F3FC> | johnson and johnson vaccine | Ache, Feverish, Flu |
| I had Covid mid November, I was floored too, for four weeks, pyrexia, tachycardia 120 resting, gastric flu like symptoms, fatigue, sore eyes, back pain, didn’t go out of the house until 18th December. I didn’t have the jab, I’m 65. Wish I could have got Ivermectin, studies out. | ivermectin | Back pain, Fatigue, Flu, Pain |
| Until I took the freaking Pfizer vaccine I could mow my lawn clean and walk around town without my joints locking up my Rheumatic Fever was in remission until I took the freaking shot. Now my joints are right back where they were when I was first diagnosed with Rheumatic Fever | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Joint lock, Rheumatism |
| Insane…unvaccinated & had covid. The breathing, cold, muscles aches, heavy fatigue, headaches, throat etc. Ivermectin, vitamin d & c, zinc, black seed oil, some fervex ( french medicine) after five days I was back to normal. | ivermectin | Ache, Coldness, Cold, Fatigue, Headache, Muscle ache |
| I had COVID too about a month ago and followed existing protocols to the best of my abilities. 72 h with fever (39 ish), a sore throat for a week and fatigue. I regret not getting ivermectin to fend off replication early. Probably should have been a way shorter experience. | ivermectin | Fatigue, Fever, Sore throat |
| I done went down a rabbit hole on this damn Pfizer vaccine and I’m making these heart palpitations worse. | pfizer vaccine | Palpitations |
| I’ve experienced hair loss and leg cramps/pains from the Moderna vaccine <U+0001F489> | moderna vaccine | Hair loss |
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: Mar 15, 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.