Covid-19 in the news this week
- Intestinal Spirochetes Associated With Asymptomatic COVID-19 Infection
- EMA reviews repurposed experimental cancer drug for Covid-19, even without a submission
- China approves Genuine Biotech’s HIV drug for COVID patients
- CanSinoBIO’s inhaled COVID booster stronger against BA.1 Omicron subvariant than Sinovac shot #dv_covid #covidvaccines https://t.co/ORw33WKatW
- FDA re-authorizes Meridian Bioscience’s COVID-19 assay
Daily sentiment
Net daily sentiment ranged from -35.19 for Remdesivir on Wednesday the 27th to 31.62 for Monoclonal antibodies on Friday the 29th.
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. Redness had the highest overall net sentiment of 8.74. Cancer had the lowest net sentiment this week (-49.8).
| medical condition | count | sentiment |
|---|---|---|
| Infection | 100 | -1.03 |
| Sickness | 73 | -22.50 |
| Flu | 62 | -33.72 |
| Cancer | 46 | -49.80 |
| Coldness, Cold | 38 | -10.21 |
| Redness | 36 | 8.74 |
| Fall | 35 | -1.62 |
| Blindness, Blind | 25 | -1.84 |
| Kidney failure | 23 | -42.31 |
| Poisoning | 21 | -48.07 |
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 170 tweets with an strong positive sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Infection, (2) Redness, (3) Sickness, (4) Blindness, Blind, (5) Flu, (6) Coldness, Cold, (7) Fever, (8) Fall, (9) Bell’s palsy, (10) Pneumonia. Of these terms, Fever (n=7), Bell’s palsy (n=5), Pneumonia (n=5) were not in the top 10 most frequent terms across all tweets.
Negative tweets:
There were 330 tweets with an strong negative sentiment. The top 10 most frequent medical conditions mentioned within these tweets were (1) Sickness, (2) Flu, (3) Infection, (4) Cancer, (5) Kidney failure, (6) Cardiac arrest, (7) Fear, (8) Poisoning, (9) Redness, (10) Coldness, Cold. Of these terms, Cardiac arrest (n=13), Fear (n=13) 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 |
|---|---|---|
| I was diagnosed with Covid twelve days after the 1st Moderna shot.
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 |
| Kidney pain in my experience was quite different to back pain and I’ve had both. Some similar pain after the 2nd comirnaty dose though. | pfizer vaccine | Back pain, Kidney pain, Pain |
| I tested positive for #COVID19 a couple of months ago. At the time I had two doses of the #Pfizer vaccine and a half-dose of the #Moderna vaccine as a booster. My symptoms were minimal. I had a slightly drippy nose, & the occasional cough. I’ve had mild colds that were worse. | moderna vaccine, pfizer vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Coughing, Cough |
| Got the J & J vaccine last year. Immediately got dizzy and my heart was beating hard for 2 hours. Then it stopped.
Now I’m getting these “blood clot patches” under my skin on my arms. Never had them before in my life. They disappear after a few days, and then another one pops up |
johnson and johnson vaccine | Dizziness, Dizzy |
| _Down_Under I have 4 autoimmune diseases & my bad result was the vaxes didn’t work. I had serious COVID with pneumonia. I got monoclonal antibodies which stopped the pneumonia, but 6 months later I am sleeping 14 hours, my memory is shot & I’m exhausted, which I was not before I got COVID. | monoclonal antibodies | Exhaustion, Pneumonia |
| I had a Pfizer booster in October 2021 I got what they call covid arm and felt so lethargic I couldn’t get of the sofa for 3 days. TBH I felt worse after Pfizer vaccine than I did in June, when I had a cold and got pneumonia | pfizer vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Lethargic, Pneumonia |
| Feeling better less than 24 hours after waking up to fever and crud. 0.5cc Ivermectin, 2 Tylenol sever cold, 2 motrin. Lots of OJ and rest.. I’m not going to test or quarantine myself. If that was delta covid.. I beat you. I’m hungry so that’s good. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Fever |
| _lies This was my experience. I was very sick for 2 days for both doses of the moderna vaccine. Then got Covid and felt like I had a minor cold. | moderna vaccine | Coldness, Cold, Sickness |
| So when i received the moderna vaccine, I broke out in hives for two weeks after the second shot. Now that I caught covid, I notice that I am scratching myself a lot more… somehow it is related | moderna vaccine | Hives |
| It’s quite normal, especially if the third vac. is Spikevax (Moderna). Had it after 2x Comirnaty (BioNTech) and I felt like dying. My son had a third Comirnaty shot and despite a red spot had literally no problems. | pfizer vaccine | Redness |
| “Moderna vaccine Side-effects rash. 2.5 days later around 4pm. Took 2 Benadryl, rash came back 5 days, not as severe, but I do take Dupixent shots 4 eczema which suppresses my immune system. I was sitting on my couch & felt heatI looked into the mirror & texted pics 2 my boss.” | moderna vaccine | Eczema, Rash |
| That’s awful I’m so sorry <U+0001F61E> the Pfizer vaccine burst the artery in my grandmas nose, she lived but just about, and it damaged my hearing and gave me severe vertigo which took me months to recover from | pfizer vaccine | Vertigo |
| _move _Magoo5 _xetts _korma _on_A14 _the_dog _j I started getting a cold last year. When I get sick I get all the way sick. Immediately hit the Ivermectin and I never got sick. That had never happened before. I got the covid recently, again IVM – had massively faster recovery than other people around me that were also sick. | ivermectin | Coldness, Cold, Sickness |
| I appreciate your efforts <U+0001F60A> I have a chronic injury and autoimmune illness which may/may not have been complicit in creating long covid-like symptoms for me after my 1st/only Pfizer vaccine (Pericarditis, pain, extreme fatigue/brain fog) I haven’t had Covid but can relate <U+0001F614> | pfizer vaccine | Pain |
| Unvaccinated and had Covid last November. I took hydroxychloroquine and never had any respiratory symptoms. I was extremely tired and stomach symptoms. It was the sickest I’ve ever felt but it was the first time I’ve ever had the flu. No regrets that I didn’t take the vaccine. | hydroxychloroquine | Flu |
| Moderna vaccine Sideeffects rash. 2.5 days later around 4pm. Took 2 Benadryl, rash came back 5 days, not as severe, but I do take Dupixent shots 4 eczema which suppresses my immune system. I was sitting on my couch & felt heatI looked into the mirror & texted pics 2 my boss. | moderna vaccine | Eczema, Rash |
| I’m just getting over Covid, thought I had the flu. Sniffles , runny nose fever aches, and cough and being extremely tired . No energy. Got over the fever in three days. Doc gave me ivermectin and a z pac. Also take allergy meds and cold meds. With some ibuprofen. It helps a lot. | ivermectin | Ache, Allergy, Coldness, Cold, Coughing, Cough, Fever, Flu, Runny nose |
| I got the Moderna vaccine myself (fully) and had to have my heart checked due to taking stimulant meds for my adhd.
Nothing wrong with my heart. |
moderna vaccine | ADHD |
| Ms Bishop, I too have been dealing with long Covid,especially anxiety ,sleep disorder…I took Ivermectin recently and it helped with some of the severity of the symptoms. also I have people praying for my healing and that has been helpful…lost my job because of sleep issues | ivermectin | Anxiety, MS |
| I got covid this year. It was nothing! I ran a slight fever off & on for a week. Had a raspy throat for half a day & a snotty nose forever it seemed because cedar fever season. I took Ivermectin. I kept thinking, “I have some kind of heart damage now & covid is nothing!” | ivermectin | 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.