Covid-19 in the news this week
- Novavax Announces Expanded Agreement with SK bioscience to Manufacture COVID-19 Vaccine Containing Omicron Variant and Manufacture the Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine in Prefilled Syringe
- Thousands report unusual menstruation patterns after COVID-19 vaccination
- Novavax non-mRNA COVID vaccine gets CDC approval
- Simultaneous COVID-19 mRNA, Flu Vaccination Linked to More Adverse Reactions
- WHO releases global COVID-19 vaccination strategy update to reach unprotected
- Myocarditis Phenotype Is a Key Predictor of Outcomes in COVID-19
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -30.6 for Remdesivir on Tuesday the 19th to 42.3 for Monoclonal antibodies on Wednesday the 20th.
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. Blindness, Blind had the highest overall net sentiment of 32.74. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-47.2).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 135 | 4.48 |
| Sickness | 91 | -23.15 |
| Cancer | 63 | -47.20 |
| Flu | 57 | -45.58 |
| Blindness, Blind | 53 | 32.74 |
| Poisoning | 40 | -39.22 |
| Redness | 38 | -0.12 |
| Coldness, Cold | 32 | -12.10 |
| Fever | 31 | -10.03 |
| Pneumonia | 29 | -13.63 |
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 251 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Blindness, Blind, (3) Sickness, (4) Redness, (5) Coldness, Cold, (6) Cancer, (7) Pneumonia, (8) Fever, (9) Worry, (10) Flu. Of these terms, Worry (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 377 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Sickness, (2) Cancer, (3) Flu, (4) Infection, (5) Poisoning, (6) Kidney failure, (7) Pain, (8) Fever, (9) Worry, (10) Coldness, Cold. Of these terms, Kidney failure (n=15), Pain (n=15), Worry (n=14) 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 “like” within the search for “Ivermectin” 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 “human” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| _KeKe I took three doses of Pfizer vaccine, the first one I had pain in my arm (at the vaccine local), the second one I have a little bit of fever and the third dose I had fever too but it was just one day of side effects | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Pain |
| I’m still recovering after 3 vaxes. I was so sick I had to have monoclonal antibodies, which the hospital gave me. My husband had 2 vaxes and was sick 3 days. He went skiing on the 5th day. I slept 22 hours a day for 3 weeks, still sleep 12-13. I am tired, drained – long COVID! | monoclonal antibodies | Sickness |
| Day 2 of my second round with Covid. Very different from the classic strain I picked up from work in March 2020.
Sore throat. High fever. Tachycardic. Epistaxis. No cough. Looking after both my girls, solo, in this heat. Good thing I’m already on hydroxychloroquine, eh? /s |
hydroxychloroquine | Coughing, Cough, Fever, Sore throat |
| I finally got covid, the day I noticed a slight sore throat and headache, I tested positive. I started ivermectin right away. After 1.5 days I was just about <U+0001F4AF>. I only had yucky bodyaches for a night, the next night I broke a glorious sweat and it was over. Btw I’m not Vaxxed. | ivermectin | Headache, Sore throat, Sweating |
| I had 3 shots and got covid 2 weeks after my 3rd shot. I couldn’t get monoclonal antibodies. I had a rough time and it took 3 weeks before my symptoms lessened. I have had weird issues since my 2nd shot – numbness of hands and feet, headaches, fatigue, and tinnitus. | monoclonal antibodies | Fatigue, Headache, Numbness, Tinnitus |
| The number of people suffering from the side effects of the imposed vaccines by corrupt governments is staggering! I used to jogging at least three times a week . Now I cannot climb the stairs without suffering excruciating pain in my knees, since I got my second moderna vaccine! | moderna vaccine | Pain, Staggering |
| I got the Pfizer vaccine. After second dose — 3 days after —my feet went numb. I was diagnosed with Transverse Myelitis. I have now been diagnosed with MS Multiple Sclerosis. Tough hand to be dealt. One day at a time. MOPO THE DAY! <U+0001F4A5> | pfizer vaccine | MS, Multiple sclerosis, Numbness |
| I got the fourth Pfizer vaccine today Like Sunmi’s song, my body heats up. I just took a pill of aspirin first,2nd Tylenol? Sun Mi -Heart Burn -1hr-Live – – – – – | pfizer vaccine | Burn |
| I had long covid for a year and a half. I was in pain, icing 7-8 hrs a day, tearing muscles…
I took ivermectin and the pain was gone in a fucking day. The hop in my step in two. |
ivermectin | Pain, Tearfulness |
| Me when I took the Moderna vaccine Felt like I had internal shivers like when I get sick with the cold Horrendous | moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Shivers, Shivering, Sickness |
| Plan B has way more unpleasant side effects than the Covid(Pfizer) vaccine! My friend was sick for days and didn’t get a period for months after taking Plan B. The only side effect I had from my vaccines was a long nap after the second one! | pfizer vaccine | Sickness |
| I took the pfizer vaccine, the booster shot, and the flu vaccine. Tested negative for covid. I’m so scared of going to sleep. I have never felt like I wasn’t going to wake up again until now. | pfizer vaccine | Flu |
| I had shingles about 20 years ago. I had something akin to a very mild case after my second moderna vaccine. | moderna vaccine | Shingles |
| I got it once in March 2020 I avoided it by taking remdesivir in 2021 I got mild covid again not too long ago and finally took the antiviral which I think made me sicker. I hate needles I would have been pissed to get shots and still get sick | remdesivir | Sickness |
| On Thurs morning, I took the 2nd recommended dose of Ivermectin. By that afternoon, I was 100% recovered (symptom-wise, anyway), feeling as if I had never been sick. So, 48 hrs after taking Ivermectin, my COVID symptoms were completely resolved. My sister had similar results. /3 | ivermectin | Sickness |
| Overnight, I awoke soaked with my clothes and bedding soaked in sweat. Later Tuesday morning, I took a second test to confirm: COVID positive. With that confirmation, I took the recommended dosage of the 3mg tablets of Ivermectin I had secured months before. /2 | ivermectin | Sweating |
| I have had 4 vaccines (2 boosters). With the very 1st Moderna vaccine I had a pretty bad headache & fatigue that lasted abt 24 hrs & I took extra strength Tylenol & went to bed to allow my body to recover & rest. I’ve never had a reaction to the boosters. | moderna vaccine | Fatigue, Headache |
| I took ivermectin within 3 hours of feeling sick with what ultimately was a two-week covid related exhaustion. I had a fever in the first 6 hours took the kitchen sink including ivermectin and my fever and all other symptoms were gone in the following 4 hours. | ivermectin | Exhaustion, Feeling sick, Fever, Sickness |
| I got the fourth Pfizer vaccine today Like Sunmi’s song, my body gets hot. So-I just took a pill of Aspirin.
Sun Mi -Heart Burn -1hr-Live – – – – – |
pfizer vaccine | Burn |
| I got Covid pneumonia and bacterial pneumonia. In addition I got the monoclonal antibodies, and I almost died. I am thankful that I survived. | monoclonal antibodies | Pneumonia |
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 31, 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.