Covid-19 in the news this week
- Covid-19 vaccines involved in 7 out of 10 reports of adverse reactions in 2021
- End of the COVID-19 pandemic is in sight, says WHO chief
- Older adults at higher risk for Alzheimer’s after having COVID: Study
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -40.21 for Remdesivir on Saturday the 17th to 18.16 for Moderna vaccine on Friday the 16th.
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 7.85. Fear had the lowest net sentiment this week (-54.45).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 100 | -2.70 |
| Sickness | 53 | -44.39 |
| Cancer | 47 | -42.60 |
| Poisoning | 42 | -53.38 |
| Flu | 40 | -14.39 |
| Fall | 19 | -28.31 |
| Pneumonia | 19 | -25.46 |
| Fear | 17 | -54.45 |
| Forgetfulness | 17 | -11.52 |
| Blindness, Blind | 15 | 7.85 |
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 124 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Flu, (3) Cancer, (4) Sickness, (5) Allergy, (6) Bleeding, (7) Coldness, Cold, (8) Forgetfulness, (9) Meningitis, (10) Ache. Of these terms, Allergy (n=4), Bleeding (n=4), Coldness, Cold (n=4), Meningitis (n=4), Ache (n=3) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 278 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Sickness, (2) Poisoning, (3) Cancer, (4) Infection, (5) Flu, (6) Pneumonia, (7) Fall, (8) Fear, (9) Kidney failure, (10) Pain. Of these terms, Kidney failure (n=9), Pain (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 “mutat” within the search for “Monoclonal antibodies” 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 “legal” 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 |
|---|---|---|
| So yesterday I got a Pfizer vaccine in left arm & shingles vaccine in the right & it was quite sore- especially my right arm. I took a 600MG ibuprofen last night & this morning they R a little bit sore but not bad. | pfizer vaccine | Shingles |
| Got back from Arizona last Sunday and finally go the rona. Made it this long surprisingly. Only 2x Pfizer vaccine’s for me but I’m 32. Oddly enough the worst was out of this world joint pain, I’ve already got blown out knees. Fever + Chills but no coughing really. | pfizer vaccine | Chills, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Fever chills, Joint pain, Pain |
| I was diagnosed with Covid twelve days after the 1st Moderna shot last year.
Got Covid pneumonia & bacterial pneumonia. Got the monoclonal antibodies. Missed 6 weeks of work, and still today I have long Covid. I am grateful I survived. |
monoclonal antibodies | Pneumonia |
| Moderna vaccine done, apart from a very sore arm initially, a mild headache and some fatigue, I am feeling fully back to normal! #COVIDBooster Let’s hope the normal feeling is still with me by morning! | moderna vaccine | Fatigue, Headache |
| I ended up in the hospital for 3 days after the 1st Moderna vaccine, 4/30-5/3/21. I’ve been on Topiramate & seeing a Neurologist since that hospital stay for the Hemiplegic Migraines the vaccine gave me. I had never had a migraine in my life before the vaccine. | moderna vaccine | Migraine |
| 2 months after my 2nd jab of Pfizer vaccine I developed nerve pain in my neck and arms. Got to the point I could not move my arms and use my hands. Developed RA and completely became a cripple and was in constant pain throughout my body. Reported to VAERS. | pfizer vaccine | Nerve pain, Pain |
| My Name Rodney McKenzie. (peters rodney) Twitter + Facebook. I Had 2 Shots Of Pfizer Vaccine I Lost My Appetite, Couldn’t Eat, Lost Weight Got Malnutrition, Vertigo, Flashbacks. I Lost My Mind And Couldn’t Walk. I Am Still Very Unwell. | pfizer vaccine | Lost weight, Malnutrition, Vertigo |
| My left arm is slightly aching a bit after I had the Moderna vaccine <U+0001F489>. I can feel it when I move my arm where it went in | moderna vaccine | Ache |
| I got the (Moderna) vaccine Wednesday around 1805. Started feeling pain & body aches overnight. Temp of 103.8 around 1100 on Thursday. By Friday morning, I felt normal (except arm soreness).
I did not really feel a difference in symptoms among this one compared to the previous. |
moderna vaccine | Ache, Pain |
| _Charles I got the Moderna vaccine, weird heart flutters for a couple days that made me uneasy, 8 weeks later I got Covid. Not going there again! | moderna vaccine | Heart fluttering |
| I got the Bivalent Moderna vaccine last week. No problem but my arm was tender for a day or two. | moderna vaccine | Tenderness |
| I got the new Moderna vaccine AND my flu shot at the same time, like my doctor told me to. Both in the same arm. Arm hurt and felt “flu-y” for about 24 hours, but then it was all over and I’m all done. | moderna vaccine | Flu |
| A friend got the J&J vaccine and had paralysis on one side of her body for weeks. She also now has heart issues. Another friend suddenly got A-Fib, within a week or 2 of getting the Pfiezer booster. My mom got Moderna, & felt weak, had joint pain, & headaches for a year. | johnson and johnson vaccine | Headache, Joint pain, Pain, Paralysis, Weakness |
| My husband and I had the new moderna vaccine. Warning it made us feel tired, aches,generic blah for 3 days. | moderna vaccine | Ache |
| For most, its like a cold. It was for me. I was sicker when I had the flu. I felt better in 5 days. Fine in 9. Then again I took ivermectin etc.
Oh..I also never got that Covid shot. Im really happy I refused that.. |
ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Flu |
| I had my 4th Moderna vaccine in the spring. Besides a bit of arm soreness, I didn’t feel anything. My first two shots, I felt like I had the flu. My third shot, I still felt a bit sick, but less than the first two. Side effects are progressively lessening for me! | moderna vaccine | Flu, Sickness |
| Had my lab work done at the local VA CBOC as I do yearly. A1C was below 6. Got the moderna vaccine 1&2 a month later. One month after the shot cycle went to the ER due to blurred vision, fatigue, all around terrible feeling. Blood suger was 900+, A1C came back at 12+. | moderna vaccine | Blurred vision, Fatigue |
| I got shingles shortly after the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. I am not anti-vax, but I will not be getting a booster. Shingles is horrible and I hope you are better soon. | pfizer vaccine | Shingles |
| @_wtf_woman Thank you. The Moderna vaccine made my arm really sore (and I got the “Moderna rash”), but the shingles shot is the worst! | moderna vaccine | Rash, Shingles |
| I’m unvaccinated and caught Covid then took ivermectin once a day for five days and didn’t get sick at all no headache no sore throat yep nothing the only symptoms I got was I lost my smell and taste on day 8 for 24 hours that’s it | ivermectin | Headache, Sickness, Sore throat |
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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- 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: Oct 04, 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.