Covid-19 in the news this week
- FDA grants Triad biotech broader OK to utilize COVID diagnostic test
- A combined influenza and COVID-19 mRNA vaccine
- FDA reauthorizes Meridian’s COVID-19 test after changes to enable omicron detection
DrugVisual Covid-19 links
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -44.11 for Remdesivir on Monday the 1st to 21.41 for Moderna vaccine on Saturday 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. Blindness, Blind had the highest overall net sentiment of 19.16. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-47.15).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 123 | -1.92 |
| Sickness | 72 | -28.75 |
| Flu | 44 | -28.49 |
| Blindness, Blind | 34 | 19.16 |
| Cancer | 31 | -47.15 |
| Fear | 28 | -42.15 |
| Coldness, Cold | 26 | -29.68 |
| Fever | 23 | -23.89 |
| Fall | 21 | 4.85 |
| Pain | 21 | -45.49 |
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 172 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Sickness, (3) Blindness, Blind, (4) Flu, (5) Fall, (6) Coughing, Cough, (7) Worry, (8) Coldness, Cold, (9) Fever, (10) Fear. Of these terms, Coughing, Cough (n=7), Worry (n=7) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 269 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) Fever, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Fear, (8) Kidney failure, (9) Pain, (10) Pneumonia. Of these terms, Kidney failure (n=12), Pneumonia (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 “like” within the search for “Ivermectin” had the highest overall weight. When the words are summed for each topic, Moderna 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 “get” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Forbidden subjects , i had covid two years ago and a month ago, i was prescribed hydrocloroquin , ivermectin and azitromicine and paracetamol , stayed positive for about 10 days. 3 days were rough with fever and chills , diharrea, pain in muscles, some cough. | ivermectin | Chills, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Pain |
| I suffer from #OTC symptoms after my Pfizer #vaccine but I had some mild symptoms in my youth too. Bladder disorders are of course only psychological. <U+0001F921> I’m just imagining my kidney pain. All in my head <U+0001F609> | pfizer vaccine | Kidney pain, Pain |
| <U+0001F633><U+0001F633> J & J vaccine, is scary almost +- 600 of my colleagues have been vaccinated with it, and mostly have headaches, back pain, neck pain, and knee pain. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Back pain, Headache, Knee pain, Neck pain, Pain |
| Got my 2nd Booster this afternoon with Moderna vaccine. So far, muscle ache on my left jabbed arm… No fever yet… #covidbooster #moderna | moderna vaccine | Ache, Fever, Muscle ache |
| My doctor recommended it and my mom went to a pharmacy that gave it out. I’ve had covid three times. The first time it ran it’s course. Felt like shit for one day and groggy the rest. The two times after I took ivermectin and felt like I didn’t have anything. | ivermectin | Groggy |
| I’ve had tinnitus since my first Pfizer vaccine last September. Had terrible vertigo at the time as well. I had my 2nd bout of covid 4 weeks ago and the ringing in my ears has definitely increased. So sorry to hear you are experiencing such awful ongoing symptoms. | pfizer vaccine | Tinnitus, Vertigo |
| My fam of 4 had covid in Nov. 9 yr old had a sore throat & headache for one day. 11 yr old had a sore throat for one day. I had flu-like symptoms for 4 days, coughed for longer. Hubby had flu-like symptoms for 5 days but took Ivermectin & bounced back quickly. All took vitamins. | ivermectin | Coughing, Cough, Flu, Flu-like symptoms, Headache, Sore throat |
| I just got over 5 months of the worst damn J&J vaccine reaction so I totally feel for you living with pain. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Pain |
| Got COVID in dec took ivermectin, zinc, vit D, C and quercetin. had a sore throat for 2 days and chills. Fever stayed below 100 | ivermectin | Chills, Fever, Sore throat |
| Unfortunately, after receiving the first and second doses of Pfizer vaccine, I had the same side effects as being infected with COVID-19, such as fever, pain all over the body, joint pain and fatigue.Up to now,BC government has been sending text messages urging me to take the 3rd | pfizer vaccine | Fever, Infection, Joint pain, Pain |
| I got Covid Fall of 2021. Took ivermectin, symptoms were mild. Worst symptom was being exhausted Especially at end of day. Been exposed multiple times since but haven’t gotten it again. My friend got vax spring 2021, He has had Covid 3 times since. We are both late 50s. | ivermectin | Exhaustion, Fall |
| Well vaccine double dose got rid of my bronchitis and over the last year, never had bronchitis, cold and no flu either. So who’s lied then? | pfizer vaccine | Bronchitis, Coldness, Cold, Flu |
| Got covid and it was actually bad this time, started ivermectin yesterday. Within 4 hours my breathing was easier and fever broke. Have people had similar experiences? | ivermectin | Fever |
| My mom suffered a pulmonary embolism in her lungs after her second Moderna vaccine last fall. She has not fully recovered as of yet. She never ever had Covid. | moderna vaccine | Embolism, Fall, Pulmonary embolism |
| Has anyone had any adverse or unusual symptoms after having the Moderna vaccine booster? I don’t mean normal stuff like achy arm or just generally feeling unwell. | moderna vaccine | Feeling unwell |
| Saw my ENT today. He looked w/an instrument into my sinuses & told me I will need a second sinus surgery. The Moderna vaccine gave me a horrible sinus infection. For 1-1/2 yrs I’ve been bleeding from my right nostril, along w/heavy mucus. Don’t trust those vaccines! | moderna vaccine | Bleeding, Infection, Sinus infection, Sinusitis |
| My double dose family was sick for a week. I took care of them. I spent 3 hours in covid waiting room at hospital with my sick spouse. When it hit me I had a Headache for 2 days. Minor throat for 1 day. completely recovered. No ivermectin in Canada. I took artemesia instead. | ivermectin | Headache, Sickness |
| I took the jab!!! After Moderna Vaccine<U+0001F612><U+0001F622><U+0001F914><U+0001F623> Weeks later I had a heart attack And now for some reason i cant Walk <U+0001F9BD>I took the first shot, Never went back for second. Life Changed, Potentially Forever. <U+271D>Please keep me in your prayers… <U+0001F64F> | moderna vaccine | Heart attack |
| Me. I had the J & J vaccine a year and a half ago. I was an avid backpacker (100-240 mile trips) … I now am so exhausted all the time I can barely get through my day since the vax. And yes, I have had extensive blood work done to make sure nothing else is wrong with me. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Exhaustion |
| _tx wtf is in your vaccines? I’ve had the anthrax vaccine a hep vaccine a yellow fever vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine and non of them have given me the symptoms I got from yours. Feel like Ive been hit by a bus | pfizer vaccine | Fever |
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: Aug 17, 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.