Covid-19 in the news this week
- CDC lifts final COVID-19 travel restriction Sunday
- WTO Conference Could End with Agreement on COVID Vaccine IP Waiver This Week
- Ivermectin Does Not Shorten Recovery Time From Covid, Study Finds
- COVID vaccine for kids: FDA panel likely to recommend Pfizer, Moderna
- Sanofi’s ‘next-generation’ COVID-19 booster outperformed traditional boosters
- FDA says Moderna’s Covid vaccine is effective, safe for young children
- Moderna COVID-19 vaccine may pose higher heart inflammation risk: US CDC
- Thromboembolic events observed with AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine; absolute risk small
- COVID-19 Vaccine and Paralysis: Rare Causes and Treatment
- WHO: COVID-19 deaths rise, reversing a 5-week decline
- Ivermectin doesn’t show a meaningful reduction in COVID-19
- More than One Thousand Genes Linked to Development of Severe COVID-19
- GPR183 gene a novel drug target for severe COVID-19
- A Possible Biomarker for COVID-19 Cognitive Impairment
- COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate Nanocovax Induces Robust Immunity
- Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Authorizes Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccines for Children Down to 6 Months of Age
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -36.06 for Remdesivir on Sunday the 12th to 28.64 for Monoclonal antibodies on Sunday the 12th.
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 8.89. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-40.77).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 148 | 8.89 |
| Sickness | 94 | -12.77 |
| Flu | 60 | -27.61 |
| Cancer | 49 | -33.18 |
| Coldness, Cold | 44 | 2.27 |
| Inflammation | 42 | -2.89 |
| Poisoning | 35 | -40.77 |
| Fever | 30 | -18.41 |
| Forgetfulness | 29 | 1.87 |
| Blindness, Blind | 28 | -0.46 |
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 259 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Coldness, Cold, (4) Fall, (5) Inflammation, (6) Blindness, Blind, (7) Flu, (8) Cancer, (9) Worry, (10) Shingles. Of these terms, Fall (n=15), Worry (n=9), Shingles (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 346 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Sickness, (2) Infection, (3) Flu, (4) Cancer, (5) Poisoning, (6) Inflammation, (7) Fever, (8) Pain, (9) Pneumonia, (10) Coldness, Cold. Of these terms, Pain (n=15), Pneumonia (n=15) 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 “show” 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 “risk” within the search for “Moderna 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 |
|---|---|---|
| I’m available for comment. Had Covid 3 months ago – a fever and sore throat for 2 days. I used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine right from the beginning of the symptoms. I woke up on the 3rd day feeling normal and without any symptoms. | hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin | Fever, Sore throat |
| __Jackson I came down with Covid Saturday evening. Started ivermectin, hydroxicloriquine, zinc, vitamin D & C and 800MG Advil to calm the insane head aches down. Sunday was a horrible day in bed all day with body aches, head aches, cold chills, nausea. Took 2 melatonin last night. | ivermectin | Ache, Chills, Coldness, Cold, Nausea |
| Hello world I’m 35 year old and I’m Vaccine INJURED from vaccine in 2021. My story: Almost a year now with undoing symptoms.I took reaction 5 min after I taking the vaccine. Difficulty breathing, dizziness. Hot waves all over my body.Ive been left out that day. | pfizer vaccine | Difficulty breathing, Dizziness, Dizzy |
| Got the COVID round 2! I take hydroxychloroquine daily for autoimmune. Like last round, within hours of taking my daily dose of HCQ, symptoms started to dissipate. Today, I woke up with a cold <U+0001F937><U+0001F3FC><U+200D><U+2640><U+FE0F> | hydroxychloroquine | Coldness, Cold |
| I was home from work that day , being healthcare I had recd the moderna vaccine the day before. I had a high temp, I was so dizzy when I saw the news I thought it was a hallucination! Disgusting <U+0001F922> | moderna vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy, Hallucinating, Hallucinations |
| _son Yes, it does. Anyway, that’s bullshit. I just beat COVID this week. Woke up feeling not so hot on Monday. Got a second + test Tues morning & immediately took my 3mg tablets of Ivermectin. By Thurs afternoon, I was back to 100% – like I’d never been sick. My April flu was worse. | ivermectin | Flu, Sickness |
| I’ve had covid. The bad covid. Coughing up blood and blood pouring out of my nose. I’ve not had the shot and I’ll never get the shot and I’m still here. Ivermectin got me through it. | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough |
| I got my 2nd dose of the pfizer vaccine yesterday and when i woke up this morning i literally couldn’t move my arm cuz it was so painful. I’m also feeling really lightheaded and nauseous, what do i do? and did anyone else get similar side effects? | pfizer vaccine | Nauseous, Pain |
| @_ashawndabney Me, I’ve never gotten Covid. I’m fully vaccinated and boosted. Had the Pfizer vaccine. Only side effects were tiredness and slight headache from first shot. Next 3 shots, nothing. | pfizer vaccine | Headache, Tiredness |
| I just had Covid, but I was fortunate enough to have Ivermectin. I’m feeling well; this was barely a cold. So grateful I was up to date on my Ivermectin. I know Covid would have been much worse without it. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| I got two shots of the moderna vaccine and ain’t got sick. Some get sick some do. | moderna vaccine | Sickness |
| I was infected with Covid-19 and I never felt a thing because I and my wife took Ivermectin both before and after. She had a slight fever for 2 days and I never had any effects at all! | ivermectin | Fever, Infection |
| I got the J&J vaccine in April of Last year and I got sick with COVID a week later , But I can at least say I haven’t gotten sick since. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Sickness |
| I’m 48 and a month after getting my 2nd Pfizer vaccine last year I got shingles. I have MS and all hell broke loose in my body after the vaccine. No new MS activity shown on MRI yet shingles, eye stys(which I’ve never had before), muscle weakness& tightness, & pityriasis rosea. | pfizer vaccine | MS, Muscle weakness, Shingles, Weakness |
| _1984 Contact Front line doctors. I got ivermectin from them. Took it the day i tested positive with sore throat, gone in 2 days. Faint covid line on day 4 and negative day 6. I feel like it worked well for me | ivermectin | Faint, Fainting, Sore throat |
| I got the Moderna Vaccine and Booster because my job overseas required it. I got extremely sick and tested positive for COVID just 4 days after my Booster shot this last November. I was sick for almost 3 weeks after. Whatever was in that Moderna booster jacked me up. | moderna vaccine | Sickness |
| I got an autoimmune disease after my first Pfizer vaccine. It’s eating on my muscles and nerves. My Doctor said I should get better. It’s been 9 months and still can’t walk without a walker, the pain is unbearable. I think it’s more then 100,000. | pfizer vaccine | Pain |
| I had the initial two doses of the Moderna vaccine. Three weeks later, I had a heart attack. At age 45. The only way I will ever put another dose of a Covid vaccine in my body is at gunpoint. And even then, it would be iffy. | moderna vaccine | Heart attack |
| I tested positive for Covid last Thursday. Thanks to my Moderna vaccine and two boosters, I have had worse colds! For me, it only lasted a few days. Get better soon! | moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold |
| _123 I took ivermectin when I had covid. I got it from a human pharmacy. I barely knew I was sick and I have not had the vaccine. | 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.
- 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: Jun 30, 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.