Covid-19 in the news this week
- CDRAP: Global COVID cases fall as CDC extends travel mask order
- CNN: FDA authorizes first Covid-19 breath test
- Reuters: Canada authorizes AstraZeneca’s drug for COVID prevention
- Reuters: Omicron-specific Sinopharm, Sinovac COVID vaccine candidates cleared for clinical trial
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -25.51 for Remdesivir on Wednesday the 13th to 11.89 for Hydroxychloroquine on Saturday the 16th.
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 33.31. Sickness had the lowest net sentiment this week (-50.6).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 148 | -16.93 |
| Cancer | 105 | -44.67 |
| Flu | 62 | -38.59 |
| Poisoning | 58 | -36.45 |
| Sickness | 58 | -50.60 |
| Hepatitis | 38 | 33.31 |
| Blindness, Blind | 31 | -6.54 |
| Coldness, Cold | 26 | -15.29 |
| Heart attack | 25 | -38.59 |
| Fall | 23 | 8.71 |
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 192 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Hepatitis, (3) Cancer, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) Flu, (6) MS, (7) Coldness, Cold, (8) Fall, (9) Inflammation, (10) Poisoning. Of these terms, MS (n=9), Inflammation (n=6) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 399 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Cancer, (3) Sickness, (4) Flu, (5) Poisoning, (6) Heart attack, (7) Blindness, Blind, (8) Coldness, Cold, (9) Inflammation, (10) Pain. Of these terms, Inflammation (n=9), Pain (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, 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 chronic nausea back from my second Moderna vaccine. My first Moderna booster was fine. Just tired. | moderna vaccine | Nausea |
| Friday evening I had my 4th Moderna vaccine or 2nd booster. I want you to know this was the easiest of them all for me. The arm tenderness is already gone. I was really swollen with a bad rash after the 3rd. No fever, chills, aches or pains. I napped, but that is something I do. | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Fever, Fever chills, Pain, Rash, Tenderness |
| _AndreMarin Wow. That sounds awful. I’m 56, & had covid unvaxed. Bad headache on day 1, followed by mild fatigue &back to 1 hr cardio/day on day 14. I used iMask+ (with ivermectin). Hope you feel better soon. | ivermectin | Fatigue, Headache |
| _a_1984 I got docynec kits from indiamart. Ivermectin, doxycycline and zinc acetate. Had covid 4 weeks ago. I was sick with extremely mild cold symptoms for 3 days. Ivermectin works wonders. Felt better hours after my first dose. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Cold symptoms, Sickness |
| _ Drink lots of good fluids, and one thing at a time. Headaches are the worst, my Moderna vaccine headache was something else <U+0001F635> – hope you’re feeling improved very soon! | moderna vaccine | Headache |
| Finally got my booster (Moderna). Similar side effects to my 2nd pfizer vaccine <U+0001F630>
Super tired so went to sleep early. Just woke up at 3am with a fever, but slowly going down now. All in all, it’s not tragic. I just wish I didn’t do it the day before a job interview <U+0001F644> |
pfizer vaccine | Fever |
| I too am un vaxxed and had covid, took ivermectin and recovered in 2 days from fever, took another couple days for the back ache to go. No cough, no runny nose. Just glad i never got the jab | ivermectin | Ache, Back ache, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Runny nose |
| Severe headache 8/10 this morning and today from pfizer vaccine 4 months ago. Uncomftable leg and heart discomfort continues. Do not feel well, do not fee like myself. This poison is robbing me of my happy life I feel trapped in my body. Was a very strong man before.Its criminal | pfizer vaccine | Discomfort, Headache, Poisoning |
| Tuesday 12/4 09:45, Day 4, (day 2 after positive test) First few days have been complicated by the plane flu I picked up. Fever/shivers gone after two nights. Just a slight aching and tiredness now. Flu or covid? Meds – My usual daily high dose Vit C/D/K Ziverdo Ivermectin kit | ivermectin | Ache, Flu, Tiredness |
| The lingering fatigue after taking the pfizer vaccine has got to be the most annoying thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. Just too annoying. | pfizer vaccine | Fatigue |
| I had just turned 51 last February. 5 days after receiving my 2nd dose of the Moderna vaccine I had a heart attack. I’m a marathoner as well. 3 stents and lots of rehab and I’m back running. Hope your brother is ok! | moderna vaccine | Heart attack |
| Sending you across the ocean hugs <U+0001F499> Tbe worst part with this covid was the sinus pressure in the head along with coughing constantly. I had the monoclonal antibodies the first time- it spiked my temperature to 102 F, it felt like death for just that night. You got this! | monoclonal antibodies | Coughing, Cough, Sinusitis |
| Pfizer vaccine has wiped me out. But not a bad feeling. Yet to get much of the fluish feeling. It’s my fourth Pfizer, as I’m a high risk person. Don’t think the flu vaccine is having any effect. I ate lunch, felt okay at first. Been in pain since, but only around 8/10. |
pfizer vaccine | Flu, Pain |
| Double vaxxed & 2 weeks in hospital. Oxygen down to 85. Monoclonals, Remdesivir once I got home IVM. IVM gave me the greatest bump in my oxygen from 91 to 98 after the 3rd pill. Home with covid Pneumonia on oxygen. My unvaxxed family had head colds w/body aches &a sore throat. | remdesivir | Ache, Coldness, Cold, Pneumonia, Sore throat |
| My experience was 7-10 days of flu-like side effects from the Pfizer vaccine. When I get my 2nd booster am going with Moderna. | pfizer vaccine | Flu |
| #NoToHealthActAmendment i am one of the people who got very sick from the Pfizer vaccine. I had to get the jab bcoz of work. I hate this. | pfizer vaccine | Sickness |
| I have experienced same “brush off” by doctors after getting severe tinnitus 3 days after Moderna vaccine…that was March 22 last year(2021)…still suffering from bad bouts that I have had to live with plus now getting on and off vertigo. | moderna vaccine | Tinnitus, Vertigo |
| I agree! The shingles vaccine made my arm much more sore than the Moderna vaccine. | moderna vaccine | Shingles |
| I got 2 doses of Sinopharm vaccine in Iran + 2 doses of Pfizer vaccine in Melbourne. Got Covid for the first time last week. Day 1-5: unbearable sore throat<U+0001F616>, cough, fatigue. Day 6: running nose, dizziness, impaired sense of smell.
It’s not going to be mild for everyone:( |
pfizer vaccine | Coughing, Cough, Dizziness, Dizzy, Fatigue, Sore throat |
| Day one after my third booster: All I feel is a fcking sore arm <U+0001F4AA><U+0001F3FC>
Disclaimer: I got the Pfizer vaccine for all 3 and I didn’t experience any side effects for any of them. A bit of fatigue the next day but that’s my personality, and then life continued. <U+0001F489> |
pfizer vaccine | Fatigue |
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: Apr 22, 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.