Covid-19 in the news this week
- CNBC: UK has detected a new Covid variant. Here’s what we know so far about omicron XE
- NBC: The BA.2 subvariant is now 72 percent of new Covid cases. Experts say don’t panic.
- CNN: Study reveals how Covid-19 infections can set off massive inflammation in the body
- Reuters: Roche says U.S. FDA grants priority review to Actemra for COVID-19
- Reuters: China Kintor’s COVID drug candidate cuts hospital, death risk in trial
- Reuters: CanSinoBIO’s mRNA COVID vaccine candidate cleared for trials in China
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -27.4 for Remdesivir on Saturday the 9th to 20.71 for Moderna vaccine on Friday the 8th.
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. Hepatitis had the highest overall net sentiment of 44.51. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-47.21).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 166 | -7.33 |
| Sickness | 69 | -31.33 |
| Flu | 59 | -23.58 |
| Blindness, Blind | 41 | -10.11 |
| Hearing loss | 34 | -40.51 |
| Forgetfulness | 33 | -44.64 |
| Poisoning | 31 | -47.21 |
| Hepatitis | 30 | 44.51 |
| Pneumonia | 29 | -18.38 |
| Fever | 27 | -30.72 |
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 197 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Hepatitis, (3) Flu, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) MS, (6) Sickness, (7) Coldness, Cold, (8) Fall, (9) Fever, (10) Pneumonia. Of these terms, MS (n=9), Coldness, Cold (n=8), Fall (n=8) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 381 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) Hearing loss, (5) Poisoning, (6) Forgetfulness, (7) Fear, (8) Blindness, Blind, (9) Pain, (10) Cancer. Of these terms, Fear (n=17), Pain (n=14), Cancer (n=13) 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, 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 “shanghai” within the search for “Pfizer vaccine” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, “Moderna 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 my second dose of the COVID-19 Moderna vaccine yesterday and today I feel so bad!! My whole body hurt, my chest hurts a lot, I’m shaking, I’ve a bad fever, I want to throw up and my head feels like it wants to explode!! I hope I start feeling better tomorrow!! | moderna vaccine | Fever, Shaking |
| _Ranch Not for some! I’m immune compromised, went off my meds to get the 3 vaxes. I wore my mask, but had a bad case of COVID 19 with pneumonia. I got monoclonal antibodies that stopped the lung issues, got long COVID! 3 weeks sleeping 22 hours a day, still exhausted 3 months later! | monoclonal antibodies | Exhaustion, Pneumonia |
| _florida Got my second booster yesterday.
I had the Moderna vaccine to start and for the first booster. Pfizer/BioNTech was the only one available for my second. Almost no side effects (sore arm for a day and a little fatigue). With Moderna, I was out for a whole day after each shot. |
moderna vaccine | Fatigue |
| It has been 10 months since my Pfizer vaccine and I am still waking up with neuropathy in my arms. Right after the vaccine I had violent neuropathy in every inch of my body. I am so tired of feeling like a stranger in my own body. | pfizer vaccine | Violent |
| I’m sorry you’re feeling so bad. I had 3 Pfizer shots, then decided to get Moderna for my 4th. I fully expected to feel badly for 24 hours or so, because nearly everyone I knew who got the Moderna vaccine felt sick afterwards. But I was fine. | moderna vaccine | Feeling bad, Sickness |
| I agree. I had covid Jan.17-21. I am 61, spine problems but otherwise healthy no vacs. I had a wicked headache, fever, dry heaves and couldn’t eat with all over muscle pain. No cough. I took ivermectin 3 days. | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough, Dry heaves, Fever, Headache, Muscle pain, Pain |
| Thats odd. After my first pfizer vaccine i had chest tightness around my heart for 7-10 days. It disabled me. I had no flu ? | pfizer vaccine | Chest tightness, Flu |
| _7 Was September last year – the Covid was just a few days of a bad cold, but I was exhausted for weeks afterwards, until I got hold of the ivermectin – then I was back in the gym after 3 days | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Exhaustion |
| I fared way better than any of the vaccinated people I know. I took Ivermectin within a few hours of waking up sick and getting a positive covid test, and literally felt better within 8 hours of my first dose! By day 3, I was cleaning my house… | ivermectin | Sickness |
| _7 I have long COVID. I first got mild symptoms the week before Christmas 2021. I got a positive result in Jan 2, got monoclonal antibodies. I spent the next 3 weeks sleeping 2 hours a day. I’m sleeping 14 hours a day, exhausted all the time! Over 3 months of fatigue! | monoclonal antibodies | Exhaustion, Fatigue |
| WHAT ARE THE POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECT OF PFIZER VACCINE?
Possible side effects: Pain, redness, or swelling at the site where the shot was administered, and/or tiredness, headache, muscle pain, chills, fever, or nausea throughout the rest of the body. |
pfizer vaccine | Chills, Fever, Headache, Muscle pain, Nausea, Pain, Redness, Swelling, Tiredness |
| Got my 2nd booster of the Moderna vaccine yesterday and so far feeling ok. Just some slight body aches and fatigue. <U+0001F44D> #GetVaccinated #MaskUp #CovidIsNotOver | moderna vaccine | Ache, Fatigue |
| I woke up because my shoulder was hurting I totally blamed the Pfizer vaccine for this before I took the fourth dosage I had pain but not that much pain | pfizer vaccine | Pain |
| I started with Moderna. First booster was Pfizer, second booster was Moderna. I was a hey and exhausted with the first Moderna vaccine. Slightly tired after Moderna booster. | moderna vaccine | Exhaustion |
| I for 1 used Ivermectin.
Key is have vit D level greater than 50. Got covid. Took 20mg of IVM per day as recommended by my doctor. Day 1 felt start, day 2 had fever chills headache body aches no energy. Day 3, symptoms <U+0001F4AF> GONE. I was back in gym working out on Day 3. |
ivermectin | Ache, Chills, Fever, Fever chills, Headache |
| _leblanc I’m not vaxxed. When I got the covid I took ivermectin and was back at work in 3 days after being sick for 2 days. I’ve had worse flu. | ivermectin | Flu, Sickness |
| Q.What are the possible side effects of Pfizer vaccine? A. Redness, pain or swelling at the side where the shot was given, headache, tiredness, fever, muscle pain, nausea.These Side effects go away in few days.
#COVID19VaccineIsSafe #YesToCOVID19Vaccine |
pfizer vaccine | Fever, Headache, Muscle pain, Pain, Redness, Swelling, Tiredness |
| I just had Covid. First round of it in 2 years after caring for Covid patients. Had only body aches for 3 days. 36 hours after I started ivermectin I felt normal. | ivermectin | Ache |
| I have af and I have water retention due to the tablets for my af. So far in the past week ive wet Myself in the car. Nothing I could do. 15 months ago I was ok. But I had the Pfizer vaccine. (No I’m not anti vax) my life changed for the worse. | pfizer vaccine | Water retention |
| I’m not in Florida but I’m all for it, I used the FLCCC protocol and found a doctor through them. I got covid in Jan. I was prescribed ivermectin never got very sick and by the evening of day 2, I felt COMPLETELY NORMAL> | ivermectin | Sickness |
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.
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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: Apr 18, 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.