Cities in a pandemic: Evidence from China.

This paper studies the impact of urban density, city government efficiency, and medical resources on COVID-19 infection and death outcomes in China. We adopt a simultaneous spatial dynamic panel data model to account for (i) the simultaneity of infection and death outcomes, (ii) the spatial pattern of the transmission, (iii) the intertemporal dynamics of the disease, and (iv) the unobserved city-specific and time-specific effects. We find that, while population density increases the level of infections, government efficiency significantly mitigates the negative impact of urban density. We also find that the availability of medical resources improves public health outcomes conditional on lagged infections. Moreover, there exists significant heterogeneity at different phases of the epidemiological cycle.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS AND PREDICTION OF POLARITY VACCINES BASED ON TWITTER DATA USING DEEP NLP TECHNIQUES

The global impact of COVID-19 has been significant and several vaccines have been developed to combat this virus. However, these vaccines have varying levels of efficacy and effectiveness in preventing illness and providing immunity. As the world continues to grapple with the ongoing pandemic, the development and distribution of effective vaccines remains a top priority, making monitoring prevention strategies mandatory and necessary to mitigate the spread of the disease. These vaccines have raised a huge debate on social networks and in the media about their effectiveness and secondary effects. This has generated big data, requiring intelligent tools capable of analyzing these data in depth and extracting the underlying knowledge and feelings. There is a scarcity of works that analyze feelings and the prediction of these feelings based on their estimated polarities at the same time. In this work, first, we use big data and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to extract the entities expressed in tweets about AstraZeneca and Pfizer and estimate their polarities;second, we use a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network to predict the polarities of these two vaccines in the future. To ensure parallel data treatment for large-scale processing via clustered systems, we use the Apache Spark Framework (ASF) which enables the treatment of massive amounts of data in a distributed way. Results showed that the Pfizer vaccine is more popular and trustworthy than AstraZeneca. Additionally, according to the predictions generated by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, it is likely that Pfizer will continue to maintain its strong market position in the foreseeable future. These predictive analytics, which uses advanced machine learning techniques, have proven to be accurate in forecasting trends and identifying patterns in data. As such, we have confidence in the LSTM's prediction of Pfizer's ongoing dominance in the industry. © Hassan Badi, Imad Badi, Karim El Moutaouakil, Aziz Khamjane, Abdelkhalek Bahri 2022