Between news, debates, fake news and conspiracy, social networks have closely followed the Covid-19 pandemic. While the omnipresence of this subject on our networks can sometimes push us to want to turn away from it, could they be used as epidemic monitoring?
Tweets from January 2019 in France
According to the conclusions of an Italian study published in Scientific Reports, tweets mentioning the keywords “pneumonia” and “dry cough” had more than doubled in January 2020 compared to January 2019, in areas that later became hot spots.
The keyword “pneumonia” was mentioned 2.2 times more than the previous year, with a total of more than 2,000 tweets. The analysis covered tweets posted between December 1, 2014 and March 1, 2020 in France, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.
The main future foci of the epidemic concerned
“It is interesting to note a significant increase in tweets mentioning pneumonia in most of the selected European countries, long before the Covid-19 epidemic was officially reported in the media,” observed the Italian scientists.
Indeed, on December 31, 2019, the WHO was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in the city of Wuhan, China. The first European cases were officially detected in France on January 24, 2020, then in Germany on January 28 and in Italy on January 29.
For researchers, this finding shows that social networks could be used as indicators of a pandemic, while helping governments identify and mitigate the localized economic and social consequences of restrictions taken nationally or internationally.
