Along with the Coronavirus pandemic, another crisis has manifested itself in the form of mass fear and panic phenomena, fueled by incomplete and often inaccurate information. There is therefore a tremendous need to address and better understand COVID-19’s informational crisis and gauge public sentiment, so that appropriate messaging and policy decisions can be implemented. In this research article, we identify public sentiment associated with the pandemic using Coronavirus specific Tweets and R statistical software, along with its sentiment analysis packages. We demonstrate insights into the progress of fear-sentiment over time as COVID-19 approached peak levels in the United States, using descriptive textual analytics supported by necessary textual data visualizations. Furthermore, we provide a methodological overview of two essential machine learning (ML) classification methods, in the context of textual analytics, and compare their effectiveness in classifying Coronavirus Tweets of varying lengths. We observe a strong classification accuracy of 91% for short Tweets, with the Naïve Bayes method. We also observe that the logistic regression classification method provides a reasonable accuracy of 74% with shorter Tweets, and both methods showed relatively weaker performance for longer Tweets. This research provides insights into Coronavirus fear sentiment progression, and outlines associated methods, implications, limitations and opportunities.

Along with the Coronavirus pandemic, another crisis has manifested itself in the form of mass fear and panic phenomena, fuelled by incomplete and often inaccurate information. There is therefore a tremendous need to address and better understand COVID-19's informational crisis and gauge public sentiment, so that appropriate messaging and policy decisions can be implemented. In this research article, we identify public sentiment associated with the pandemic using Coronavirus specific Tweets and R statistical software, along with its sentiment analysis packages. We demonstrate insights into the progress of fear-sentiment over time as COVID-19 approached peak levels in the United States, using descriptive textual analytics supported by necessary textual data visualizations. Furthermore, we provide a methodological overview of two essential machine learning classification methods, in the context of textual analytics, and compare their effectiveness in classifying Coronavirus Tweets of varying lengths. We observe a strong classification accuracy of 91% for short Tweets, with the Naive Bayes method. We also observe that the logistic regression classification method provides a reasonable accuracy of 74% with shorter Tweets, and both methods showed relatively weaker performance for longer Tweets. This research provides insights into Coronavirus fear sentiment progression, and outlines associated methods, implications, limitations and opportunities.

The Coronavirus pandemic has created complex challenges and adverse circumstances. This research identifies public sentiment amidst problematic socioeconomic consequences of the lockdown, and explores ensuing four potential public sentiment associated scenarios. The severity and brutality of COVID-19 have led to the development of extreme feelings, and emotional and mental healthcare challenges. This research focuses on emotional consequences-the presence of extreme fear, confusion and volatile sentiments, mixed along with trust and anticipation. It is necessary to gauge dominant public sentiment trends for effective decisions and policies. This study analyzes public sentiment using Twitter Data, timealigned to the COVID-19 reopening debate, to identify dominant sentiment trends associated with the push to reopen the economy. Present research uses textual analytics methodologies to analyze public sentiment support for two potential divergent scenarios-an early opening and a delayed opening, and consequences of each. Present research concludes on the basis of textual data analytics, including textual data visualization and statistical validation, that tweets data from American Twitter users shows more positive sentiment support, than negative, for reopening the US economy. This research develops a novel sentiment polarity based public sentiment scenarios (PSS) framework, which will remain useful for future crises analysis, well beyond COVID-19. With additional validation, this research stream could present valuable time sensitive opportunities for state governments, the federal government, corporations and societal leaders to guide local and regional communities, and the nation into a successful new normal future. INDEX TERMS COVID-19, Coronavirus, feeling, reopen, textual analytics, sentiment analysis, Twitter, new normal I. INTRODUCTION T HE anxiety, stress, financial strife, grief, and general uncertainty of this time will undoubtedly lead to behavioral health crises.-Coe and Enomoto, McKinsey, on the COVID-19 crisis [1]. COVID-19 has become a paradigm shifting phenomenon across domains and disciplines, affecting billions of people worldwide, directly or indirectly. The current COVID-19 pandemic disaster has led to escalating emotional, mental health, and economic issues with significant consequences, and this presents a serious challenge to reopening and recovery initiatives [2]-[4]. Based on the classification of novel coronaviruses (nCoV), the 2019-2020 novel coronavirus is officially termed "Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2", also called as "SARS-CoV-2" and "2019-nCoV"". The present study uses SCoV2 (short for SARS-CoV-2) to represent the virus, and COVID-19 to represent the resulting disease [5]. In the United States (US) alone, as of June 24, 2020, COVID-19 has infected well over 3.8 million people and has taken over 142,000 lives, and continues to spread and claim more lives [6]. Moreover, as a result of the "Lockdown"

Along with the Coronavirus pandemic, another crisis has manifested itself in the form of mass fear and panic phenomena, fueled by incomplete and often inaccurate information. There is therefore a tremendous need to address and better understand COVID-19's informational crisis and gauge public sentiment, so that appropriate messaging and policy decisions can be implemented. In this research article, we identify public sentiment associated with the pandemic using Coronavirus specific Tweets and R statistical software, along with its sentiment analysis packages. We demonstrate insights into the progress of fear-sentiment over time as COVID-19 approached peak levels in the United States, using descriptive textual analytics supported by necessary textual data visualizations. Furthermore, we provide a methodological overview of two essential machine learning (ML) classification methods, in the context of textual analytics, and compare their effectiveness in classifying Coronavirus Tweets of varying lengths. We observe a strong classification accuracy of 91\% for short Tweets, with the Na\"ive Bayes method. We also observe that the logistic regression classification method provides a reasonable accuracy of 74\% with shorter Tweets, and both methods showed relatively weaker performance for longer Tweets. This research provides insights into Coronavirus fear sentiment progression, and outlines associated methods, implications, limitations and opportunities.