Covid-19 in the news this week
- MIT Technology Review: Anti-aging drugs are being tested as a way to treat covid
- Business wire: Synairgen Presents Detailed Analysis of Phase 3 SPRINTER Trial Evaluating SNG001 in Hospitalised COVID-19 Patients at ATS 2022
- FDA:Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Expands Eligibility for Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Dose to Children 5 through 11 Years
- Stat News: FDA rejects antidepressant seen as possible Covid-19 treatment
- US News: Pfizer COVID Vaccine Saved 110,000 American Lives: Study
- FDA: Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Authorizes First COVID-19 Test Available without a Prescription That Also Detects Flu and RSV
- CISION PR Newswire: Emmes Supports Landmark mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Trial in Sub-Saharan Africa
- BioSpace: Valneva Receives Notice of European Commission’s Intent to Terminate COVID-19 Vaccine Purchase Agreement
- CDC recommends Pfizer booster shot for kids ages 5 to 11 as Covid cases rise across the U.S.
- The CanSino Biologics Ad5-nCoV-S [recombinant] COVID-19 vaccine: What you need to know
- COVID-19 leading cause of death in people with diabetes in fourth quarter of 2020
- Remdesivir Stewardship Reduces Hospital Stay Duration of COVID-19 Patients
- CDC Says COVID Hospitalizations to Rise in Most States
- Estrogen treatment linked to reduced COVID-19 mortality
- WHO: COVID deaths dropped by 21% last week but cases rising
- WHO validates 11th Covid19 Vaccine
- CDC recommends Pfizer booster shot for kids ages 5 to 11 as Covid cases rise across the U.S.
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -39.46 for Remdesivir on Saturday the 21st to 24.76 for Monoclonal antibodies on Tuesday the 17th.
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. Incontinence had the highest overall net sentiment of -5.47. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-63.04).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 111 | -10.90 |
| Cancer | 58 | -39.17 |
| Incontinence | 49 | -5.47 |
| Sickness | 46 | -33.52 |
| Flu | 40 | -25.74 |
| Pain | 36 | -41.16 |
| Poisoning | 31 | -63.04 |
| Coldness, Cold | 23 | -23.11 |
| Blindness, Blind | 22 | -26.99 |
| Hepatitis | 22 | -11.77 |
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 153 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Incontinence, (3) Sickness, (4) Flu, (5) Cancer, (6) Fall, (7) Forgetfulness, (8) Worry, (9) Pain, (10) Blindness, Blind. Of these terms, Fall (n=6), Forgetfulness (n=6), Worry (n=6) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 366 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) Pain, (5) Poisoning, (6) Flu, (7) Incontinence, (8) Blindness, Blind, (9) Chest pain, (10) Forgetfulness. Of these terms, Chest pain (n=11), Forgetfulness (n=10) 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 “biontech” 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 “find” 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 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 |
|---|---|---|
| One of the mild side effects I experienced after getting booster dose of Pfizer vaccine was sleepiness.
Now the side effects have gone away and I can’t sleep. It’s kinda ironic how COVID vaccine helped me sleep better at night. |
pfizer vaccine | Sleepiness, Sleepy |
| I’ve gotten the two Moderna vaccine shots and two Moderna boosters with the first booster being a full dose. Starting with the 2nd shot I’ve had the whole run of flu like symptoms such as fever, chills, muscle aches, etc. The last booster wasn’t so bad but I still got a reaction. | moderna vaccine | Ache, Chills, Fever, Fever chills, Flu, Muscle ache |
| _dewana Dizziness, slow/fast heartbeat, fever, shortness of breath, nausea, sweating, or shivering. Side effects of remdesivir sound an awful lot like covid symptoms. | remdesivir | Dizziness, Dizzy, Fever, Nausea, Shivers, Shivering, Sweating |
| I had all these things before my Pfizer vaccine however 2 days after it did give me one week of chest pain, tachycardia, palpitations etc. Very unsettling feeling. | pfizer vaccine | Chest pain, Pain, Palpitations |
| Tiredness is a possible side effect of the Pfizer vaccine. I had my booster yesterday. Fell asleep after 2am. Woke up at 5am. Wondering bored around the house. Tiredness where are you? | pfizer vaccine | Tiredness |
| Booster shot <U+2705> Yesterday I received my 3rd inoculation with the #Moderna vaccine.
Timeline: 1 July – 1st <U+0001F489> 2 August – 2nd <U+0001F489> 24-30 Dec – Omicron <U+0001F9A0> 18 May – 3rd <U+0001F489> Side effects today are the usual: slightly raised temperature 36.8°C <U+0001F912> slight headache <U+0001F915> a runny nose <U+0001F927> |
moderna vaccine | Headache, Runny nose |
| I have long covid, no jab, from 2020. resurfaced recently, Ivermectin helps a lot! go from waking up sweating with my heart racing and blood feeling thick, pins and needles in fingers to clear in one day…I wish my insurance hadn’t blocked it, now it’s much harder to get. | ivermectin | Heart racing, Pins and needles, Sweating |
| Mom’s Covid Journey
Day 1: runny nose, sore throat Day 3: PCR neg Day 7: runny nose, sore throat, run down Rapid Test + Monoclonal antibodies Day 13: Still Strong Rapid + She thought is was allergies #TestAndTestAgain #COVID19 #LongCovid #CovidIsNotOver #5daysIsNotEnough |
monoclonal antibodies | Allergy, Runny nose, Sore throat |
| _vs_Evil _Canada Adverse events/effects are:
Comirnaty vaccine: Swelling at the injection site Pain at the injection site Headache Joint aches Muscle aches Tiredness Chills Fever Anaphylactic shock Myocarditis |
pfizer vaccine | Ache, Chills, Fever, Headache, Injection site pain, Joint ache, Muscle ache, Pain, Swelling, Tiredness |
| Mavs had the suns legs shaking after they pulled out last night. Lookin like a bad Pfizer vaccine. | pfizer vaccine | Shaking |
| Yes, head and chest congestion w/light non painful cough, dark green gunk and stuffy. I think I am. I’m taking ibuprofen, Tylenol, Mucinex, and a muscle relaxer. I have had precisely 0.00000% desire to find any ivermectin. Covid test #2 was positive. 11 days now. | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough, Pain |
| Cause and effect? “At higher doses, ivermectin can have toxic effects on the brain and cause …confusion and difficulty walking,” Overdosing on ivermectin can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, seizures, coma, and even death. | ivermectin | Coma, Confused, Confusion, Diarrhea, Dizziness, Dizzy, Nausea, Overdose, Seizure, Vomiting |
| Three and counting. All mild. Yes I wash my hands. Wore a mask. And 1 J&J vaccine. 1st. Before covid. 2nd while traveling. 3rd ass of nephew coughed on my food and stayed at my house while sick. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Coughing, Cough, Sickness |
| Ivermectin got rid of it both times in 2 days max. The first time I had it I had covid pneumonia | ivermectin | Pneumonia |
| Hi, I’m also from the UK 26, been suffering from head pressure since the the first Pfizer vaccine back in June last year. Also other symptoms such as muscle aches and tingling. Never had any health issues beforehand. | pfizer vaccine | Ache, Head pressure, Muscle ache, Tingling |
| 2/2 end of the day it was very mild. Not even in top 20 colds I’ve had. Caught covid again I’m Feb (assume Omicron) took ivermectin again and literally had head and bit of body ache for a day. Either that and the supplements helped, or for me it’s not even a bad cold | ivermectin | Ache, Coldness, Cold |
| “At higher doses, ivermectin can have toxic effects on the brain and cause neurological symptoms including confusion and difficulty walking,” Overdosing on ivermectin can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, seizures, coma, and even death. | ivermectin | Coma, Confused, Confusion, Diarrhea, Dizziness, Dizzy, Nausea, Overdose, Seizure, Vomiting |
| “At higher doses, ivermectin can have toxic effects on the brain and cause neurological symptoms including confusion and difficulty walking,” Overdosing on ivermectin can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, seizures, coma, and even death. | ivermectin | Coma, Confused, Confusion, Diarrhea, Dizziness, Dizzy, Nausea, Overdose, Seizure, Vomiting |
| I use it against every thing. Got allergies Ivermectin, got the flu Ivermectin, got Covid Ivermectin, Monkey pox Ivermectin. I was losing my hair took Ivermectin. | ivermectin | Allergy, Flu |
| Going through menopause, after 6 months without a period, had one 2 weeks after both Astrazeneca vaccines, also a bad headache the day after first vaccine but migraine pill eased it. No side effects after 3rd vaccine other than a sore arm, which was Pfizer vaccine. | pfizer vaccine | Headache, Migraine |
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: May 25, 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.