ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: In April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic saw a rise in the number of children with a multi-system hyperinflammatory disease with myocardial involvement and characteristics of toxic shock syndrome, Kawasaki Disease Shock Syndrome, atypical Kawasaki disease. Clinicians turned to social media to discuss what they were seeing and several names for this new syndrome were used, including Paediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome - Temporally Associated with SARSCoV- 2 and MIS-C. The use of these different names and hashtags may have affected the discussion and ability to share information. Our goal was to examine the real-time conversation on Twitter related to the discovery of this new syndrome. METHODS: We examined conversations occurring on Twitter in the pediatric critical care (PCC) community by examining hashtags associated with #PedsICU. Symplur Signals was used to identify the MIS-C related hashtags. We examined the digital footprint containing those hashtags including stakeholders, frequency of use, and the most commonly tweeted links. RESULTS: Between April 1st and July 21st 2020, there were 50,628 tweets by 13,411 users in the #PedsICU dataset resulting in 128,609,673 impressions. Thirteen new hashtags were identified related to MIS-C in 3664 tweets by 1391 users;#PIMSTS and #MISC were the most commonly used in 3085 (84%) of these tweets. Although #PIMSTS was promoted more in the UK and #MISC in the US, there were no significant differences in usage by country. Of the users tweeting with these MIS-C related hashtags, 39% were healthcare providers, 23% were physicians, and 6% were healthcare organizations. The five most commonly shared links were shared 248 times and included links to research articles, government guidelines, news articles, and a review blog. Peaks of usage of these hashtags coincided with the publication of research articles. CONCLUSIONS: New hashtags like #PIMSTS and #MISC have been used in the PCC community to focus and disseminate contents related to a novel pediatric syndrome related to COVID19. The evolving definitions and names used for this new entity are converging, but early confusion in names may have hampered discussion on Twitter and curation of reliable content.