The world is facing the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to an unprecedented change in the lifestyle routines of millions. Beyond the general physical health, financial, and social repercussions of the pandemic, the adopted mitigation measures also present significant challenges in the population’s mental health and health programs. It is complex for public organizations to measure the population’s mental health in order to incorporate it into their own decision-making process. Traditional survey methods are time-consuming, expensive, and fail to provide the continuous information needed to respond to the rapidly evolving effects of governmental policies on the population’s mental health. A significant portion of the population has turned to social media to express the details of their daily life, rendering this public data a rich field for understanding emotional and mental well-being. This study aims to track and measure the sentiment changes of the Mexican population in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we analyzed 760,064,879 public domain tweets collected from a public access repository to examine the collective shifts in the general mood about the pandemic evolution, news cycles, and governmental policies using open sentiment analysis tools. Sentiment analysis polarity scores, which oscillate around -0.15, show a weekly seasonality according to Twitter’s usage and a consistently negative outlook from the population. It also remarks on the increased controversy after the governmental decision to terminate the lockdown and the celebrated holidays, which encouraged the people to incur social gatherings. These findings expose the adverse emotional effects of the ongoing pandemic while showing an increase in social media usage rates of 2.38 times, which users employ as a coping mechanism to mitigate the feelings of isolation related to long-term social distancing. The findings have important implications in the mental health infrastructure for ongoing mitigation efforts and feedback on the perception of policies and other measures. The overall trend of the sentiment polarity is 0.0001110643.

The world has been facing the COVID-19 pandemic, which has come with an unprecedented impact on general physical health and financial and social repercussions. The adopted mitigation measures also present significant challenges to the population’s mental health and health-related programs. It is complex for public organizations to measure the population’s mental health to incorporate its feedback into their decision-making process. A significant portion of the population has turned to social media to express the details of their daily life, making these public data a rich field for understanding emotional and mental well-being. To this end, by using open sentiment analysis tools, we analyzed 760,064,879 public domain tweets collected from a public access repository to examine the collective shifts in the general mood about the pandemic evolution, news cycles, and governmental policies. Several modern language models were evaluated and compared using intrinsic and extrinsic tasks, that is, the sentiment analysis evaluation of public domain tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. This study provides a fair evaluation of state-of-the-art language models, such as BERT and VADER, showcasing their metrics and comparing their performance against a real-world task. Results show the importance of selecting the correct language model for large projects such as this one, for there is a need to balance costs with the model’s performance.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented change in the lifestyle routines of millions of people. Beyond the multiple repercussions of the pandemic, we are also facing significant challenges in the population’s mental health and health programs. Typical techniques to measure the population’s mental health are semiautomatic. Social media allow us to know habits and daily life, making this data a rich silo for understanding emotional and mental well-being. This study aims to build a resilient and flexible system that allows us to track and measure the sentiment changes of a given population, in our case, the Mexican people, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We built an extensive data system utilizing modern cloud-based serverless architectures to analyze 760,064,879 public domain tweets collected from a public access repository to examine the collective shifts in the general mood about the pandemic evolution, news cycles, and governmental policies using open sentiment analysis tools. We provide metrics, advantages, and challenges of developing serverless cloud-based architectures for a natural language processing project of a large magnitude.

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