Covid-19 in the news this week
- Intermittent fasting linked with less severe cases of COVID-19, study finds
- COVID Variants Found in Sewage Weeks before Showing Up in Tests
- COVID-19 vaccines may have saved 235000 lives
- Novavax COVID-19 vaccine conditionally authorized in the EU for adolescents aged 12 through 17
- FDA allows pharmacists to prescribe Paxlovid COVID treatment
- FDA declines EUA for aviptadil for patients with critical COVID-19 at immediate risk
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -33.62 for Remdesivir on Wednesday the 6th to 29.18 for Monoclonal antibodies on Wednesday the 6th.
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 5.34. Poisoning had the lowest net sentiment this week (-56.92).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 138 | 5.34 |
| Sickness | 71 | -28.92 |
| Flu | 49 | -19.24 |
| Fear | 43 | -46.34 |
| Cancer | 35 | -31.61 |
| Coldness, Cold | 32 | 1.81 |
| Poisoning | 32 | -56.92 |
| Blindness, Blind | 24 | -7.47 |
| Worry | 23 | -23.47 |
| Fever | 22 | -14.03 |
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 192 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) Flu, (5) Arthritis, (6) Fall, (7) Rosacea, (8) Cancer, (9) Blindness, Blind, (10) Fever. Of these terms, Arthritis (n=8), Fall (n=8), Rosacea (n=8) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 292 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Sickness, (2) Infection, (3) Fear, (4) Flu, (5) Poisoning, (6) Cancer, (7) Pneumonia, (8) Worry, (9) Blindness, Blind, (10) Coldness, Cold. Of these terms, Pneumonia (n=12) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| I’m on day 4 of covid. Started ivermectin day one. It’s 2am I just woke up because I broke my slight fever. Bed soaked in sweat. The night before was rough, head and body aches, now I feel like I’m on the other side! Yay!!! | ivermectin | Ache, Fever, Sweating |
| I just got covid on Thursday took Ivermectin , HCQ and barely any symptoms. Slight headache, scratchy throat worked out everyday and today feel totally fine.. not vaxxed either. | ivermectin | Headache |
| I have these fingers too, after my 2 Pfizer vaccine. Also high pulse when moving around and standing, blodpressure All over, cant keep my warm, burning hands, exercise intolerance, Deep musclepain, Strange skin, dry eyes, lost weight without eating different,lost half my hair… | pfizer vaccine | Burn, Dry eyes, Lost weight |
| I contracted Covid from my vaxxed husband; he got it in the hospital. I’m over 55 and I got sick fast: 102 temp, flu aches, headache, cough and loss of taste. I started on ivermectin 1st day. In 48 hrs all but last two symptoms were gone. | ivermectin | Ache, Coughing, Cough, Flu, Headache, Loss of taste, Sickness |
| I had 2nd Moderna vaccine and got inflammation of the heart, chest pain for 10 months then got covid and suspected heart attack back to hospital. Test after test now awaiting results this Thursday <U+0001F44C>. Almost 1 year of chest pain.. | moderna vaccine | Chest pain, Heart attack, Inflammation, Pain |
| 2 years before covid I had embarked on a “microbiome rebuild/restore” protocol from Kiran Krishnan’s labs. I am convinced it improved my immune response… got covid last month, had the awful headache, tested positive and took one dose ivermectin.. symptoms GONE in 20 minutes! | ivermectin | Headache |
| Cold medicine. Still had annoying cough. Otherwise fine. Cough slowed down through day 7. I’ve been much sicker in my life. I’ve had one j&j vaccine in 2021. None of us went to doctor or laid in bed all day. So if you catch an annoying cold, it’s probably just covid. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Coughing, Cough |
| _Wachter I had the same combo. And then I got Covid this week. 2 days of severe cold like symptoms. Received monoclonal antibodies on day 1. Starting to feel better on day 3. | monoclonal antibodies | Coldness, Cold |
| _Bone Me hands started doing this post 2nd moderna vaccine (no #Covid infection). When I exercise my hands turn red and swell and my joints all turn white. Started 36 hours after my 2nd shot. Still happening today. Anyone else? | moderna vaccine | Infection, Redness, Swelling |
| I had Covid a few weeks ago. Ivermectin, zpak, vitamin c, d, NAC, quercitin, b complex and some Advil. It was a chest cold and I’ve had much worse. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this sick. High fever, body aches,chills, ears killing,razor blades in my throat. Cranky & miserable. Covid didn’t effect this badly last year. Went to the walk in & was told it’s “viral”. WTF! I have some old ivermectin. Should I try it? | ivermectin | Ache, Chills, Fever, Sickness |
| My daughter is recovering from Long Covid and she had the heart racing, night sweats, tingling and numbness in her arms, legs. Took ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, anti inflammatories, high dose vitamin D, B. Is much better. | hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin | Heart racing, Night sweats, Numbness, Sweating, Tingling |
| I tested positive for Covid a few weeks ago and began taking ivermectin. I had head cold type symptoms only. For someone who has had repeated sinus infections my whole life, I’ve never recovered so quickly from one. I was a different person within 24 hours. #ivermectinworks | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Infection, Sinus infection, Sinusitis |
| I’m Unvaccinated, DVT in my left leg, 35 yrs old not in the best of shape, and got covid first-time last week.
Took Ivermectin, Quercetin, and vitamins. I was sick for 1 or 2 days and my 103 fever went down to 98 a couple of hours after the medicine. Hope you feel better |
ivermectin | Fever, Sickness |
| Omicron is over there are even more mild mutations. I have covid, I’m on day 4 just woke up to a broken sweat I feel 90% better! Thank you ivermectin, Vit C and Pepcid ac | ivermectin | Sweating |
| I declined the shots. Got Covid in May. It was like a cold. I took ivermectin etc. Was fine in 9 days. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| I contracted Covid with all the nasty symptoms…immediately took my RX of Ivermectin, antibiotics, steriods. Felt better in 2 days but cough & loss of taste lingered. Zinc helped. My vaxxed & boosted kids came home from vacation with it. Son & DIL still sick! | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough, Loss of taste, Sickness |
| I’m unvaxed, got Covid, took ivermectin and sailed through it like a mild cold. We’ve been handed a bill of goods. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold |
| I had 2 shots of AZ, no reaction, caught Covid with very few symptoms, felt a bit tired for a few days.
Moderna vaccine? Armpit massively swells up |
moderna vaccine | Swelling |
| _picto After getting the Pfizer vaccine I ended up with rheumatoid arthritis which is an immune disorder that will never go away. I’m in my late 40’s and healthy before this happened. No one in my family has RA so it is a complete surprise to me. | pfizer vaccine | Arthritis, Rheumatoid arthritis |
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: 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.