Covid-19 in the news this week
- China’s Clover says its COVID booster shot candidate lifts antibody against Omicron
- Pfizer says tweaked COVID-19 shots boost omicron protection
- Incidence rate for Novavax’s adverse reactions higher than other COVID vaccines: HSA
- COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Linked to Higher Adverse Event Risk vs Traditional Vaccines
- How many lives have been saved by covid-19 vaccines?
- A New Covid Vaccine That’s Effective Against Omicron Could Hit The Market This Year
- Jack Last died of a blood clot days after Covid jab, inquest told
- COVID-19 could put us at a greater risk of neurodegenerative diseases and stroke
- BioNTtech in conflict with regulator over new COVID vaccine approval
- Rare heart-related side effects higher with Moderna COVID vaccine
- Antiviral pill Paxlovid cuts risk of hospitalization for COVID-19 patients by 45%
- Epstein-Barr may play a role in some long COVID; coronavirus can impair blood sugar processing by organs
- Sinopharm’s COVID-19 vaccine shows good immunogenicity in senior people with underlying diseases as well as in healthy subjects: study
- FDA panel recommends changing Covid shots to fight omicron this fall
- South Korea Approves First Domestically Developed COVID-19 Vaccine
- Corticosteroids Decrease Mortality Risk in Patients With Severe COVID-19
- BioNTech, Pfizer to start testing universal vaccine for coronaviruses
- Oxford Biomedica signs new deal to make AstraZeneca COVID shot
- Pfizer Seeks FDA’s Full Approval for Paxlovid Covid-19 Pill
- Heart Arrhythmia After COVID Vaccine: A Rare Side Effect
- Covid Shots Worked Better for Obese Than Underweight in UK Study
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -47.72 for Remdesivir on Saturday the 2nd to 23.2 for Monoclonal antibodies on Saturday the 2nd.
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. Fall had the highest overall net sentiment of 20.08. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-54.25).
medical condition | count | sentiment |
---|---|---|
Infection | 116 | 3.16 |
Sickness | 74 | -30.64 |
Cancer | 55 | -54.25 |
Fall | 43 | 20.08 |
Flu | 34 | -36.42 |
Coldness, Cold | 32 | 2.24 |
Pneumonia | 27 | -20.14 |
Pain | 22 | -43.20 |
Poisoning | 22 | -25.08 |
Fever | 18 | 3.71 |
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 180 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Fall, (3) Sickness, (4) Coldness, Cold, (5) Pneumonia, (6) Cancer, (7) Flu, (8) Paralyzed, (9) Fever, (10) Poisoning. Of these terms, Paralyzed (n=6) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 289 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) Flu, (5) Pneumonia, (6) Pain, (7) Poisoning, (8) Kidney failure, (9) Coldness, Cold, (10) Forgetfulness. Of these terms, Kidney failure (n=11), Forgetfulness (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 “full” within the search for “Pfizer vaccine” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Ivermectin 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 “rush” 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 |
---|---|---|
_McCulloughMD I had COVID last week (2nd time, 1st was 7/2021)… was offered Paxlovid, declined.
Got Ivermectin instead, within 24 hours of initial dose I felt ~80% better. Residual congestion was only lasting effect. No fatigue or violent cough this time. Headache, sore throat, congestion. |
ivermectin | Coughing, Cough, Fatigue, Headache, Sore throat, Violent |
I tried something last night. I marinated my chicken in Pfizer vaccine juice and let me tell you…Absolutely delicious. Barbecue sauce? Get out. Honey garlic? Pfft, nope. Vaccine juice. It’s mRNAddictive! It was so good, I felt my heart swell! #VaxMyBird #PouletPfizer | pfizer vaccine | Swelling |
My first Moderna vaccine dose had me sick for two days. Second dose was really bad too. Moderna booster shot nearly killed me.
But my second booster shot was Pfizer, and I didn’t feel a single thing?? |
moderna vaccine | Sickness |
Good ole rushed through drug, by Pfizer, Paxlovid. Bounce back Covid. This has happened to several friends of mine. It made a couple truly sick. Their bounce back was worse than the first. I am getting over Covid. I took Ivermectin. Day 5, feeling pretty good. | ivermectin | Sickness |
I am unvaccinated and got shingles, but at the behest of my doctor(my symptoms were not that bad when I had covid) I got monoclonal antibodies and felt terrible for two days after, 6 weeks later I got shingles. | monoclonal antibodies | Shingles |
I also had difficulty swallowing, sleeping and anxiety last year right after getting the Moderna vaccine. I’m still not 100% but I’m better than I was. I went 4 months averaging 0-3 hours of sleep per night. I have had my blood tested, and I’ve not had COVID. | moderna vaccine | Anxiety |
I had covid at 56, unvaxed. Headache, day 1. Started ivermectin. Day 2-14, little bit tired. Day 14 &every day afterward- 1 hour cardio. Same for my husband. Today – Feel better than before covid. Maybe it’s the ivermectin? | ivermectin | Headache |
All I know is I got the J/J vaccine April 2021 the worst mistake I ever made in my life, I had young kids so I thought well I better get the vaccine so I got the shot few days later I’m dying from a stroke I felt it happening nothing in life is one size fits all | johnson and johnson vaccine | Stroke |
Absolutely does. I was prescribed ivermectin 24 mg tablets. First sign of COVID symptoms I took 2 a day. Tested positive and had a slight headache for 3 days. Back on my feet in 2days. So YES it works. | ivermectin | Headache |
I got the Pfizer vaccine yesterday, I’ve been sick since last night. | pfizer vaccine | Sickness |
— I had the pfizer vaccine in Dec. within 10 minutes I had chest pressure. 3 days later, I was diagnosed with Covid. I still have chest pain and pressure—is there anything I can do to help it? I used to be a runner and now I have exercise intolerance. Help?!? | pfizer vaccine | Chest pain, Chest pressure, Pain |
I hope you are healed soon. When I had COVID I had the monoclonal antibodies. Glad I did because I was pretty sick even with the treatment. | monoclonal antibodies | Sickness |
I’m 58 and finally got what they say is Covid, last month. 3 days of fatigue, headache, loss of appetite ,loss of taste, 2 days recovery.Done. Been taking Ivermectin prophylactically since September last year. First day of symptoms until day 5, took one 12mg tablet. Feeling fine. | ivermectin | Fatigue, Headache, Loss of taste |
Ive gotten the bout of myocarditis after the pfizer vaccine and have had odd sickness’ coughing like crazy, sob, left arm disfunction and weird nerve issues since my first 2 doses. I won’t get any more. Not until we’re sure its a coincidence n not the vaccine. | pfizer vaccine | Coughing, Cough, Sickness |
Well I had COVID with a fever of 112 (C = 44). Took ivermectin and within 3 minutes my temperature was 92 (C = 33). Magnificent. My anecdote is better than yours. | ivermectin | Fever |
Thank you so much! Doing all o that. The second rapid test was positive. So I finally have Covid. I think the ivermectin brought my fever down, it was up to 102 last night and it’s down to 100.4 now. | ivermectin | Fever |
I’m unvaccinated and on my ninth day of my CoVID infection. I’ve been taking Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin along with zinc etc. No symptoms other than a head cold, although I’m still testing positive. | hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Infection |
I’m so happy to see you are feeling better. I saw you on GMA this morning and was stunned that you had the same symptoms that my brother is experiencing. This started right after his J&J vaccine. They first thought he had a stroke. Seeing you was like looking at my brother. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Stroke |
I have covid right now, been using ivermectin, fluoxetine, Vit D, K2 nac. Tested strongly positive Friday night LFT turned red immediately. Sunday night the worse sore head throat and 38.8 temp. Think I will be ok by tomorrow. | ivermectin | Redness |
I have covid right now, been using ivermectin, fluoxetine, Vit D, K2 nac. Tested strongly positive Friday night LFT turned red immediately. Sunday night the worse sore head throat and 38.8 temp. Think I will be ok by tomorrow. | ivermectin | Redness |
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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- 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: Jul 15, 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.