Even before public announcements were made of the first cases of COVID-19 in Europe, by the end of January 2020, signals were already circulating on social media that something strange was happening. A new study on researchers from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, published in Scientific reports, has identified signs of growing concern about cases of pneumonia in posts posted to Twitter in seven countries, between late 2019 and early 2020. Analysis of the posts shows that the “complainant” came precisely from the geographical regions where shoots subsequently developed.
To conduct the research, the authors first created a single database with all messages posted on Twitter containing the keyword “pneumonia” in the seven most spoken languages of the European Union: English, German, French, Italian , Spanish, Polish and Dutch – from December 2014 to March 1, 2020. The word “pneumonia” was chosen because the disease is the most serious condition induced by SARS-CoV-2, and also because the 2020 flu season was milder than the previous ones, so there was no reason to think he was responsible for all the mentions and concerns. The researchers made several adjustments and corrections to the database’s publications to avoid overestimating the number of tweets mentioning pneumonia between December 2019 and January 2020, that is, in the weeks between the Organization’s announcement. World Health Organization (WHO) identified the first “cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology” – on 31 December 2019 – and the official recognition of COVID19 as a serious communicable disease, on 21 January 2020. in particular, all tweets and retweets containing links to news about emerging viruses were removed from the database to exclude from the count the mass coverage of the emerging pandemic.
The authors’ analysis shows an increase in tweets mentioning the keyword “pneumonia” in most European countries included in the study as early as January 2020, in order to indicate a continuing concern and public interest in cases of pneumonia. In Italy, for example, where the first blockade measures to contain COVID-19 infections were introduced on 22 February 2020, the increase in mentions of pneumonia during the first weeks of 2020 differs substantially from the rate observed in the same weeks in 2019. That is, potentially hidden infection points were identified several weeks before the announcement of the first local source of a COVID-19 infection (February 20, Codogno, Italy). France presented a similar pattern, while Spain, Poland and the United Kingdom experienced a two-week delay.
The authors also geolocated more than 13,000 tweets related to pneumonia in the same period and found that they came from exactly the regions where the first cases of infections were later reported, such as the Lombardy region in Italy, Madrid, Spain. and Île. of France.
Following the same procedure used for the keyword “pneumonia,” the researchers also produced a new data set containing the keyword “dry cough,” one of the other symptoms subsequently associated with COVID-19 syndrome. However, they observed the same pattern, i.e., an abnormally and statistically significant increase in the number of word mentions during the weeks leading up to the increase in infections in February 2020.
“Our study adds to the existing evidence that social media can be a useful tool for epidemiological surveillance. They can help intercept the first signs of a new disease before it proliferates undetected and also track its spread, ”says Massimo Riccaboni, a tenured professor of economics at the IMT School, who coordinated the research.
This is especially true in a situation like the current pandemic, when lapses in identifying early warning signs left many national governments blind to the unprecedented scale of the approaching public health emergency. In a successive phase of the pandemic, monitoring social media could help public health authorities mitigate the risks of recurrence of the contagion, for example, by taking stricter measures of social distancing where infections appear to increase, or vice versa, relaxing. -those in other regions. These tools could also pave the way for an integrated epidemiological surveillance system managed globally by international health organizations.
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The document “Early warnings of COVID-19 outbreaks across Europe from social media” is available after publication at: http: // www.
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