Social media sentiment analysis to monitor the performance of vaccination coverage during the early phase of the national COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Social media sentiment analysis based on Twitter data can facilitate real-time monitoring of COVID-19 vaccine-related concerns. Thus, the governments can adopt proactive measures to address misinformation and inappropriate behaviors surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine, threatening the success of the national vaccination campaign. This study aims to identify the correlation between COVID-19 vaccine sentiments expressed on Twitter and COVID-19 vaccination coverage, case increase, and case fatality rate in Indonesia. METHODS: We retrieved COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets collected from Indonesian Twitter users between October 15, 2020, to April 12, 2021, using Drone Emprit Academic (DEA) platform. We collected the daily trend of COVID-19 vaccine coverage and the rate of case increase and case fatality from the Ministry of Health (MoH) official website and the KawalCOVID19 database, respectively. We identified the public sentiments, emotions, word usage, and trend of all filtered tweets 90 days before and after the national vaccination rollout in Indonesia. RESULTS: Using a total of 555,892 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets, we observed the negative sentiments outnumbered positive sentiments for 59 days (65.50%), with the predominant emotion of anticipation among 90 days of the beginning of the study period. However, after the vaccination rollout, the positive sentiments outnumbered negative sentiments for 56 days (62.20%) with the growth of trust emotion, which is consistent with the positive appeals of the recent news about COVID-19 vaccine safety and the government's proactive risk communication. In addition, there was a statistically significant trend of vaccination sentiment scores, which strongly correlated with the increase of vaccination coverage (r = 0.71, P<.0001 both first and second doses) and the decreasing of case increase rate (r = -0.70, P<.0001) and case fatality rate (r = -0.74, P<.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Our results highlight the utility of social media sentiment analysis as government communication strategies to build public trust, affecting individual willingness to get vaccinated. This finding will be useful for countries to identify and develop strategies for speed up the vaccination rate by monitoring the dynamic netizens' reactions and expression in social media, especially Twitter, using sentiment analysis.

Social Media Data Analytics for Outbreak Risk Communication: Public Attention on the "New Normal" During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia.

BACKGROUND: After two months of implementing a partial lockdown, the Indonesian government had announced the "New Normal" policy to prevent a further economic crash in the country. This policy received many critics, as Indonesia still experiencing a fluctuated number of infected cases. Understanding public perception through effective risk communication can assist the government in relaying an appropriate message to improve people's compliance and to avoid further disease spread. OBJECTIVE: This study observed how risk communication using social media platforms like Twitter could be adopted to measure public attention on COVID-19 related issues "New Normal". METHOD: From May 21 to June 18, 2020, we archived all tweets related to COVID-19 containing keywords: "#NewNormal", and "New Normal" using Drone Emprit Academy (DEA) engine. DEA search API collected all requested tweets and described the cumulative tweets for trend analysis, word segmentation, and word frequency. We further analyzed the public perception using sentiment analysis and identified the predominant tweets using emotion analysis. RESULT: We collected 284,216 tweets from 137,057 active users. From the trend analysis, we observed three stages of the changing trend of the public's attention on the "New Normal". Results from the sentiment analysis indicate that more than half of the population (52%) had a "positive" sentiment towards the "New Normal" issues while only 41% of them had a "negative" perception. Our study also demonstrated the public's sentiment trend has gradually shifted from "negative" to "positive" due to the influence of both the government actions and the spread of the disease. A more detailed analysis of the emotion analysis showed that the majority of the public emotions (77.6%) relied on the emotion of "trust", "anticipation", and "joy". Meanwhile, people were also surprised (8.62%) that the Indonesian government progressed to the "New Normal" concept despite a fluctuating number of cases. CONCLUSION: Our findings offer an opportunity for the government to use Twitter in the process of quick decision-making and policy evaluation during uncertain times in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.