An "Infodemic": Leveraging High-Volume Twitter Data to Understand Early Public Sentiment for the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Outbreak.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Twitter has been used to track trends and disseminate health information during viral epidemics. On January 21, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention activated its Emergency Operations Center and the World Health Organization released its first situation report about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), sparking significant media attention. How Twitter content and sentiment evolved in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic has not been described.

Methods

We extracted tweets matching hashtags related to COVID-19 from January 14 to 28, 2020 using Twitter's application programming interface. We measured themes and frequency of keywords related to infection prevention practices. We performed a sentiment analysis to identify the sentiment polarity and

SUBMITTER: Medford RJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7337776 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature