Covid-19 in the news this week
- ScienceDaily: Genetic links revealed between severe COVID-19 and other diseases
- WebMD: FDA Approves First COVID Treatment for Use in Kids
- CNBC: WHO says weekly Covid deaths have dropped to lowest level since March 2020
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -36.66 for Remdesivir on Sunday the 24th to 37.76 for Remdesivir on Monday the 25th.
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. Infection had the highest overall net sentiment of 0.99. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-49.3).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 255 | 0.99 |
| Sickness | 164 | -29.55 |
| Cancer | 163 | -35.88 |
| Flu | 117 | -18.69 |
| Blindness, Blind | 112 | -13.96 |
| Hepatitis | 106 | -13.92 |
| Poisoning | 95 | -49.30 |
| Confused, Confusion | 86 | -31.56 |
| Coldness, Cold | 54 | -22.58 |
| Pneumonia | 44 | -10.06 |
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 368 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Blindness, Blind, (4) Flu, (5) Cancer, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Fever, (8) Pneumonia, (9) Poisoning, (10) Fear. Of these terms, Fever (n=12), Fear (n=8) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 765 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Cancer, (2) Sickness, (3) Infection, (4) Poisoning, (5) Confused, Confusion, (6) Flu, (7) Blindness, Blind, (8) Kidney failure, (9) Pain, (10) Coldness, Cold. Of these terms, Kidney failure (n=26), Pain (n=26) 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, Ivermectin had the highest overall weight.
Similarly, 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Oh my gosh fuck noooo! I felt the same way when I got the J&J vaccine and I had a 48 hour fever, gross liquid flow out of both ends and damn it was horrible, cold chills too which was crazy! | johnson and johnson vaccine | Chills, Coldness, Cold, Fever |
| Did you get the Moderna booster? I did. Previously, I had the Pfizer vaccine. Kept on forgetting how much my shoulder hurt until I tried to roll over onto my right side bed. Wow! It hurt then. | pfizer vaccine | Forgetfulness |
| Ivermectin saved my life. Before it was politicized. I was rough sick, then had long covid for 3 months. 2 days after my DR PRESCRIBED IT, It was like i was never sick. | ivermectin | Sickness |
| Ivermectin in human prescription saved my life.
I was coughing blood, 3 weeks bed ridden with Covid, lost 30lbs, I took 6, 3 mg Ivermectin and four hours later I stop coughing blood, two days later I took another six 3mg of Ivermectin and I was back in the Gym. |
ivermectin | Coughing blood, Coughing, Cough |
| Also. I’m sick like a dog.<U+0001F62D> Got another shot of the #Pfizer vaccine, &My body just decided it would suffer from all the side effects. Swelling, Serious pain, Weakness, I was ok soon after getting it, Even managed to go out, Then boom, Pain! Anyway, Good morning.<U+0001F618> #ZanuPFMustGo | pfizer vaccine | Pain, Sickness, Swelling, Weakness |
| I am a witness Ivermectin works well and it works quickly. I had Covid, in 3 days everything had gotten worse. I got Ivermectin the 3rd night, felt terrible. Took it around 10:30p, went to sleep and woke up 3 hours later with all the symptoms cleared. 3 days later the cough ended | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough |
| I too had a severe reaction after the 1st Moderna Vaccine. Shot given on 7/15/21. I woke up 5 days later w/ excruciating joint, muscle, back pain. Numbness in my hands. Difficulty walking. Blood work showed abnormal inflammatory markers. Pain every day. Seeing a specialist.<U+0001F622> | moderna vaccine | Back pain, Numbness, Pain |
| Got covid, omicron, fever 101.5 and really bad headache. Took ivermectin and symptoms went away in 6 hours. Still felt shitty and tired for 10 days. But it was a mild cold. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Fever, Headache |
| Boosted again on Friday. Experienced mild reactions to each of the four shots of the Pfizer vaccine, but this was the worst of them. Mild headache, injection site pain, drowsiness, and racing thoughts. Was fine by Saturday evening. | pfizer vaccine | Drowsiness, Headache, Injection site pain, Pain, Racing thoughts |
| The 1st Moderna vaccine made me sick for three days, and the 2nd Moderna vaccine made me sick for two weeks, and then I didn’t get anymore vaccines….took months till I felt good again. | moderna vaccine | Sickness |
| I got the J&J vaccine, and then I got the Pfizer booster. Although I didn’t have any reaction to the J&J, I did have reactions to the Pfizer booster: fever, muscle pain, headache… etc | johnson and johnson vaccine | Fever, Headache, Muscle pain, Pain |
| Ivermectin saved my life. It neutralized it in my sinuses and kept the Covid venom from going into my throat and lungs. | ivermectin | Sinusitis |
| Now that it seems the algorithms have changed, I need to admit something. I took ivermectin when I had covid. I went from being absolutely miserable to a mild cold in less than 24 hours. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| The Moderna vaccine gave me pains in my chest, plus constant headaches for a month. No thanks. | moderna vaccine | Headache, Pain |
| I finally got my 2nd booster of the Pfizer Vaccine. It turned out I did have to schedule an appointment. So, I chose to get an appointment for that shot for when I’d have the next day off of work. In case I sleep & run a fever all day. I wanted it when I had nothing major planned | pfizer vaccine | Fever |
| It took the county 4 days to diagnose my Covid. I suffered through it with a fever and upper respiratory trouble. As soon I was diagnosed I took Ivermectin (prescribed by doctor)Within an hour of taking it fever broke and I got well. Now you are informed. | ivermectin | Fever |
| Not sure if I would choose a Moderna vaccine again. The first dose brought me a tinnitus and the second dose made me as sick as I had not been for years. The Biontech/Pfizer vaccine worked better for me. No side effects at all despite the usual pain in the arm. | moderna vaccine, pfizer vaccine | Pain, Sickness, Tinnitus |
| 2nd Pfizer gave me long Covid symptoms-exhaustion/aches/hard breathing/headaches. Got Ivermectin from IndiaMart-it worked. Benadryl for headaches and my optimism returned. FLCCC helped me get there.
Doc said symptoms were in my head-ironically he was practicing politics-not me. |
ivermectin | Exhaustion, Headache |
| The Moderna vaccine seems to cause this . In our experience the painful arm/shoulder lasted a couple of days before fading | moderna vaccine | Pain |
| It’s been almost 2 wks since I had my sinus surgery, & my biggest fear seems to be coming true. I still have enough Moderna vaccine in my system that the sinus infection is not clearing up. Mucus and blood is still forming in my sinus cavity and now is draining into my stomach. | moderna vaccine | Fear, Infection, Sinus infection, Sinusitis |
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.
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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: May 03, 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.