Visit DrugVisual Covid-19 Dashboard
Covid-19 in the news this week
- Science Daily: COVID-19 mixed with flu increases the risk of severe illness and death
- Wall Street Journal: New Research Shows Higher Risk of Developing Diabetes After Covid-19 Infection
- Wall Street Journal: Pfizer, Unicef Strike Covid-19 Pill Deal; Pfizer will sell to the United Nations Children’s Fund up to four million treatment courses of Paxlovid for use in low- and middle-income countries
- Seeking Alpha: Novavax COVID-19 vaccine cleared for adolescents in India
- Healio: Sotrovimab is no longer authorized to treat COVID-19 in areas with high BA.2 frequency
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -31.55 for Remdesivir on Friday the 25th to 19.66 for Monoclonal antibodies on Saturday the 26th.
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 13.67. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-53.64).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 300 | -4.23 |
| Sickness | 71 | -27.97 |
| Flu | 62 | -22.11 |
| Cancer | 42 | -53.64 |
| Coldness, Cold | 42 | 13.67 |
| Pneumonia | 39 | -5.98 |
| Poisoning | 37 | -52.52 |
| Blindness, Blind | 32 | -0.48 |
| Fever | 26 | -10.92 |
| Pain | 23 | -34.33 |
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 240 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Coldness, Cold, (3) Flu, (4) Sickness, (5) Pneumonia, (6) MS, (7) Blindness, Blind, (8) Fever, (9) Inflammation, (10) Fear. Of these terms, MS (n=10), Inflammation (n=7), Fear (n=6) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 402 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) Flu, (5) Poisoning, (6) Heart attack, (7) Pain, (8) Pneumonia, (9) Fever, (10) Numbness. Of these terms, Heart attack (n=15), Numbness (n=9) 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 “approv” 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.
The 25 most important words within negative tweets (compared to positive and neutral) tweets are shown in the treemap below. The word “crimesagainsthuman” 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 finally got the second half of the first vaccine today(3/22) at 4pm! my very first vaccine was the half dose of the Pfizer vaccine, so today was the exact same thing! Here’s how I feel as of 10:30PM -body aches -chills -headache -nausea – fatigue/exhaustion -weakness -sore arm | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Chills, Headache, Nausea, Weakness |
| _longhurst I was covid positive. It’s just a cold. The worst day of my life are next two days after I got my moderna vaccine and I feel some pain in my left chest, still. | moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Pain |
| I had my third vaccination last Thursday. The third dose is the Moderna vaccine.<U+0001F489>
The first and second were Pfizer vaccines, so they are cross-vaccinations. I had a 38°C fever and headache for two days, but I am fine now.<U+0001F60A> |
moderna vaccine | Fever, Headache |
| I’ve suffered from chest pain, heart palpitations, and my migraines gotten SEVERELY worse since receiving one dose of the Pfizer vaccine. I was guilted into it and am thankful I never got another dose. | pfizer vaccine | Chest pain, Migraine, Pain, Palpitations |
| My experience with the covid booster and I had the Moderna vaccine first and got the Pfizer booster shot the other day: just slight fever and chills yesterday but today I’m fine! | moderna vaccine | Chills, Fever |
| Hi , I got similar issues post Moderna vaccine. I had a chronic gastritis typeC diagnosis prior already .. but was doing fine. Then strong nausea after vaccination. Now I have nausea whenever my stomach is empty. I feel ‘malnourished,’ in constant need of better food. | moderna vaccine | Gastritis, Nausea |
| I dunno. I had covid last year (56). First day, I had a bad headache. Started iMask+ with ivermectin. Woke up on day 2 with no headache. Mild fatigue for about a week. Back to an hour of cardio on day 14. Seems like I saved myself 2 weeks+ of illness. | ivermectin | Fatigue, Headache |
| I have a high pain tolerance and my periods after getting the Moderna vaccine have been nothing but painful. Worse than child birth <U+0001F972> | moderna vaccine | Pain |
| Day 4 of COVID: No fever after day 2/3. Slight cough and random pains in my head/neck. Received monoclonal antibodies. | monoclonal antibodies | Coughing, Cough, Fever, Pain |
| I have covid at the moment and I am glad I have ivermectin. Day 6 and I am feeling better. Pains, aches, fatigue, vision blurry, loss of appetite, sore throat and cough. Good luck in Zimbabwe from Ireland. | ivermectin | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Fatigue, Pain, Sore throat |
| I took 2 jabs of the Pfizer vaccine last year and I am fine was just dizzy for a day and following day woke up fine.. | pfizer vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy |
| I got my Pfizer vaccine in setember. I just recovered from having covid for the first time since it broke out. Happy I was vaccinated for it. Worst coughing I’ve ever had for two days. | pfizer vaccine | Coughing, Cough |
| _McCulloughMD _medical My daughters had COVID and I hung around them and felt like I was getting it. I was also having itching symptoms and I was prescribed ivermectin and over night I felt better.. | ivermectin | Itching |
| _all_day The Pfizer shot injury mimicked Long Covid: shortness of breath, chest pains, exhaustion, muscle aches, headaches, stiff neck, brain fog. Ivermectin worked on everything but the brain fog and headaches where I used Benadryl which helped immensely. Still low-level headache pressur | ivermectin | Ache, Chest pain, Exhaustion, Headache, Muscle ache, Pain, Stiff neck, Stiffness |
| COVID hasn’t been “mild” for my son. He’s experienced headaches, body aches, fever, loss of appetite, fatigue, runny & stuffy nose, rigors, coughing & brain fog. My son got monoclonal antibodies & while the “scary” symptoms are gone, he’s still symptomatic. | monoclonal antibodies | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Fatigue, Fever, Headache, Rigors |
| other people “I received my first shot of Comirnaty/Biontech Pfizer in early June 2021, the second in late July 2021. Two weeks plus after first dosage: severe pain in left hip/pelvis/upper leg, unable to walk for two days; pain in thorax region, increased TSH.” | pfizer vaccine | Pain, Unable to walk |
| I had a mild case of shingles after my second Pfizer vaccine. It is on the list of side effects. I had had the two dose shingles vaccine a couple of years prior. | pfizer vaccine | Shingles |
| If you haven’t checked the FLCCC website for Long Covid symptoms-no one can help you. My second Pfizer shot injury simulated long Covid symptoms. Ivermectin worked on muscle aches joint aches exhaustion difficulty breathing chest pains. Benadryl for brain fog. Find GOOD doctors. | ivermectin | Ache, Chest pain, Difficulty breathing, Exhaustion, Joint ache, Muscle ache, Pain |
| I had left over #Hydroxychloroquine from my RA that I had stopped using 3 months prior to getting covid (btw hadn’t been sick for 3 years while on it), & I took it as soon as I wasn’t feeling well & within 12 hours the body chills & vomiting stopped & was on road to recovery | hydroxychloroquine | Chills, Sickness, Vomiting |
| Funny I’m not jabbed, I got covid, it was very mild, no horrible nights at all. And ivermectin killed 90% of my symptoms, (sore throat, that was all), in about 8 hours. You were conned and you’re delusional. | ivermectin | Sore throat |
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 29, 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.