Exploring the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter in Japan: Qualitative Analysis of Disrupted Plans and Consequences (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND Even though COVID-19 is a pandemic, its impact is not only limited to public health but has spanned across economy, education, work style or social relationships. As the COVID-19 studies proliferating in the past two years, whether the studies would yield insights that are relevant to the individuals in the society becomes important. OBJECTIVE This study focuses on uncovering and tracking the concerns in Japan across the COVID-19 period by investigating Japanese individuals' self-disclosing of life plan disruption on the social media, hence, yielding field evidence of which concerns might warrant further addressing for individuals living in Japan. METHODS We have extracted 300,778 tweets using "Corona no-sei (due to COVID-19, because of COVID-19, or considering COVID-19) as a query phrase, which allowed us to identify the activities and life plans disrupted due to COVID-19. The number of tweets compares with the number of COVID-19 cases to analyze the correlation. In addition, we analyze frequent co-occurrence words. RESULTS Our findings showed that while education surfaced as the top concern when Japanese government announced the first state of emergency. We also observed a sudden surge of anxiety about shortage of materials such as toilet paper. While these concerns were relatively short-term concerns, as the pandemic dragged further and more state of emergencies being announced, more concerns about long-term life plans such as career, social relationships, and education started showing. CONCLUSIONS Overall, by adding the analysis on "Corona no-sei" to the conventional symptom-based monitoring, we were able to identify the underlying concerns at the peak of the disruption and across the whole time span of the three announcements of state of emergency.