Mining Physicians’ Opinions on Social Media to Obtain Insights Into COVID-19: Mixed Methods Analysis

Abstract

Background The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is considered to be the most daunting public health challenge in decades. With no effective treatments and with time needed to develop a vaccine, alternative approaches are being used to control this pandemic. Objective The objective of this paper was to identify topics, opinions, and recommendations about the COVID-19 pandemic discussed by medical professionals on the Twitter social medial platform. Methods Using a mixed methods approach blending the capabilities of social media analytics and qualitative analysis, we analyzed COVID-19–related tweets posted by medical professionals and examined their content. We used qualitative analysis to explore the collected data to identify relevant tweets and uncover important concepts about the pandemic using qualitative coding. Unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques and text analysis were used to identify topics and opinions. Results Data were collected from 119 medical professionals on Twitter about the coronavirus pandemic. A total of 10,096 English tweets were collected from the identified medical professionals between December 1, 2019 and April 1, 2020. We identified eight topics, namely actions and recommendations, fighting misinformation, information and knowledge, the health care system, symptoms and illness, immunity, testing, and infection and transmission. The tweets mainly focused on needed actions and recommendations (2827/10,096, 28%) to control the pandemic. Many tweets warned about misleading information (2019/10,096, 20%) that could lead to infection of more people with the virus. Other tweets discussed general knowledge and information (911/10,096, 9%) about the virus as well as concerns about the health care systems and workers (909/10,096, 9%). The remaining tweets discussed information about symptoms associated with COVID-19 (810/10,096, 8%), immunity (707/10,096, 7%), testing (605/10,096, 6%), and virus infection and transmission (503/10,096, 5%). Conclusions Our findings indicate that Twitter and social media platforms can help identify important and useful knowledge shared by medical professionals during a pandemic.

Chinese Public’s Engagement in Preventive and Intervening Health Behaviors During the Early Breakout of COVID-19: Cross-Sectional Study

“…Our study extends similar findings from a previous study conducted in the United States, which found general health information online was positively related to preventive behavior [ 34 ]. Our findings indicate the potential roles of social media and traditional media to deliver effective preventive campaigns related to COVID-19 [ 35 , 36 ].…”

Tracking COVID-19 Discourse on Twitter in North America: Infodemiology Study Using Topic Modeling and Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

“…Waiting for the development and rollout of a vaccine, governments across the world have implemented wide-ranging nonpharmaceutical interventions such as hand hygiene, face masks, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine, and physical (social) distancing through banning mass gatherings and lockdowns to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The impact of COVID-19 and measures to prevent transmission has generated a lot of discussion among the general population, medical and public health professionals, and government officials [ 2 , 3 ]. Some of this discourse is happening on social media such as Twitter.…”

The Role of Twitter During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Systematic Literature Review

“…An extensive range of tweets has been shared by users and the general public, although politicians (Rufai & Bunce, 2020;Yum, 2020), physicians, and health professionals (Kudchadkar & Carroll, 2020;Wahbeh et al, 2020) have also utilized this platform to share news and provide information to people. Regular users on Twitter share most of their opinions, experiences, and feelings about the crisis.…”

“…Self-reported COVID-19 symptoms on Twitter: an analysis and a research resource (Sarker et al, 2020) -Users have expressed their symptoms and described the progress of the disease by tweeting on Twitter (Wahbeh et al, 2020) -Classification of physicians' and health professionals' tweets regarding the topics of measures and recommendations, coping with false information and the capacity of the health care system to handle the COVID-19 epidemic, information, and knowledge, symptoms and disease, immunity, and safety of people against the coronavirus, tests related to COVID-19, infection, and transmission Retweeting COVID-19 disability issues: Risks, support, and outrage (Thelwall & Levitt, 2020) Tweets related to people with certain conditions are categorized as follows: -Support for people with disabilities against this disease -Lack of attention to people with physical disabilities -Most people with disabilities are at risk -Reports on the death of people with disabilities due to COVID-19 as a warning -Principles of care for people with disabilities -The skills of people with disabilities to use communication technologies -Other problems related to people with disabilities and COVID-19…”