Covid-19 in the news this week
- NPR: Shanghai reports 1st deaths from current COVID-19 outbreak
- PBS NewsHour: Analysis: Boosters are crucial, but revamped COVID vaccines will be key to ending the pandemic
- Reuters: U.S. CDC lifts COVID ‘Do Not Travel’ recommendations on about 90 countries
- CIDRAP: Air pollution may raise risk of positive COVID-19 test
- WebMD: 30% of COVID Patients in Study Developed ‘Long COVID’
- Reuters: CureVac, GSK’s experimental COVID variant vaccine effective in mice -study
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -30.1 for Remdesivir on Sunday the 17th to 37.31 for Moderna vaccine on Tuesday the 19th.
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 14.91. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-50.6).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 133 | 3.04 |
| Cancer | 75 | -29.86 |
| Sickness | 59 | -35.38 |
| Flu | 38 | -39.00 |
| Poisoning | 38 | -50.60 |
| Coldness, Cold | 34 | 14.91 |
| Hepatitis | 33 | -3.12 |
| Worry | 27 | -13.98 |
| Pneumonia | 25 | -5.41 |
| Blindness, Blind | 24 | -14.45 |
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 189 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Cancer, (3) Coldness, Cold, (4) Sickness, (5) Pneumonia, (6) Hepatitis, (7) Fall, (8) MS, (9) Worry, (10) Blindness, Blind. Of these terms, Fall (n=8), MS (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 314 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Cancer, (2) Infection, (3) Sickness, (4) Poisoning, (5) Flu, (6) Blindness, Blind, (7) Respiratory failure, (8) Coldness, Cold, (9) Confused, Confusion, (10) Fear. Of these terms, Respiratory failure (n=12), Confused, Confusion (n=9), Fear (n=8) 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 “news” within the search for “Remdesivir” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Remdesivir 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 “kill” within the search for “Ivermectin” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| After my 1st Moderna vaccine, I had a sore arm. After my second-really sore arm. After my booster-sore arm and achy with chills. Second booster-really sore arm, headache, muscle aches, achy joints, chills. Should I worry about future vaccines? | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Headache, Muscle ache, Worry |
| Good morning my lovely Twitter friends. I had a bad reaction to the Moderna vaccine last night. Fever, headache and joint pain. This is the first time this has happened to me. So rest for a while.<U+2615><U+0001F305> | moderna vaccine | Fever, Headache, Joint pain, Pain |
| #Pfizer #comiRNAty booster shot had me effed up within 7 hours. Chills throughout the night, plus a very painful shoulder. But, defo worth it. | pfizer vaccine | Chills, Pain |
| COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects Collection (2022.4.21L) Pfizer Vaccine 3rd dose side effects, painful rolling around in bed Blogger: nameless
Pfizer third shot After the third injection, I lay at home for two days without getting up, weak, high fever, and unable to stand up. The |
pfizer vaccine | Fever, Pain, Weakness |
| I got Covid a month ago. Started taking Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine right when he symptoms started. Followed Dr. Vladimir Zelenko’s protocol. First day my temp was 102.5 F. Slept all day. The 2nd day had a sore throat. I woke up on the 3rd day with no symptoms. | hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin | Sore throat |
| I got pulmonary embolisms 2 weeks and a day after my second dose of moderna vaccine. Far as I know I’ve never dad COVID. | moderna vaccine | Embolism, Pulmonary embolism |
| “My name is Raimunda Cícera Alves do Santos. On 25th August 2021 I took the first dose of the #Pfizer vaccine. On the same day, I felt local pain in my left arm.
On the third day, 28th August I started to feel swelling in my left leg” #vaccineinjuries |
pfizer vaccine | Pain, Swelling |
| Had covid in February. I was up on my Vit D and had taken my Ivermectin the week before. It was a sore throat that lasted 3 days, took Advil and I could not tell I had it. Glad I now have natural immunity. | ivermectin | Sore throat |
| Pfizer vaccine 1st dose, day 1: Muscle cramps, nausea, headache and a slight fever. Also experienced weakness but that may be because I was fasting. | pfizer vaccine | Cramp, Fever, Headache, Muscle cramp, Nausea, Weakness |
| _1984 I got a cold after 2 years… still not covid (if we are to believe those tests) . Runny nose. Did the Zelenko protocol vit C, D ,zinc ivermectin, feeling better, but still sneezing. The looks I got when I sneezed in my own car while dropping my kid at school- priceless. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Runny nose, Sneezing |
| Hi, I had covid quite bad on my chest. Took ivermectin dosage as per my body weight and within 12 hours I no longer had a temp, wasn’t short of breath and wasn’t coughing half as much. Think it was quite important for me thank you very much <U+0001F440> | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough |
| So far, I’ve had Pfizer x 2 then a Moderna booster. The initial Pfizer vaccine side effects were mostly a sore arm and fatigue. The Moderna booster knocked me on my butt for about 5 days. I’m hoping that means I was building stronger immunity. <U+0001F91E> | pfizer vaccine | Fatigue |
| First day since getting the Pfizer vaccine last year that I felt really sick.
At least Grandma stayed for support. #FGO #FateGOUSA |
pfizer vaccine | Sickness |
| The Moderna vaccine has stronger side reactions than other vaccines. In my case, I had shoulder pain all three times. | moderna vaccine | Pain, Shoulder pain |
| Funny… I got a bad headache after my Pfizer vaccine. It’s lasted a good week… and still get them off and on…but according to all your PHD’s, I’m sure that’s bogus, right?? | pfizer vaccine | Headache |
| Just got boost dose of moderna vaccine. The most painful stink i ever got <U+0001F62D> | moderna vaccine | Pain |
| My unjabbed covid story… Exposed to coughing taxi driver on Saturday. Positive test on Monday, as predicted. (Ziverdo Ivermectin kit & my usual high dose Vit C/D/K.) Exactly 7 days later a lateral flow test shows I’m clear. No particular symptoms throughout. | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough |
| _torvik I’m so sick of, you would have probably gotten worse symptoms without the vaccine”. I got covid,didn’t follow any guidelines & I’m not vaccinated. I took ivermectin & hardly had symptoms, over it in a few days. I’m 57 years old. | ivermectin | Sickness |
| I got pulmonary embolisms 2 weeks and a day after my second shot of moderna vaccine. Never had COVID though. | moderna vaccine | Embolism, Pulmonary embolism |
| I got Covid (no Vax) during Delta ( early July), not sure if it was delta or Calif.version. 2- 3 weeks weak, on/off fever, no appetite, lost 10lb. On the 2nd week, took Ivermectin,early treatments FLCCC. Fever went away , appetite came back. High antibody! | ivermectin | Appetite lost, Fever, Weakness |
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 28, 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.