ABSTRACT
Microblogging has become one of the most crucial tool for expressing and sharing the opinions and views of everyday life events. Digital channels are being used to monitor public health issues on the Internet. Twitter is a very popular source that provides tweets related to the sentiment of the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many researchers have used tweets to monitor the opinion of the people towards the coronavirus vaccine, mental health problems, treatment received by the doctors, impact of lockdown, etc. However, these works were mostly limited to the first and second waves of the pandemic. In this work, we aim to study the impact of the third wave of the pandemic, which started in December 2021 in India. We accomplished this by collecting tweet data set of two months, i.e., December 2021 and January 2022, discussing COVID-19 and having country code as "IN". We employed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique for topic modeling and labeled each tweet message with the topic words that best describe it. We also utilized sentiment labels for each tweet and analyzed the distribution of different topics across different sentiment labels. This helped us to analyze the perspectives and sentiments of the people with respect to different topic discussions. Our analysis discovered that the two most discussed topics were ``precautionary measures" like get well soon, stay safe, wear mask, etc., and ``vaccine" where people have discussed about its effectiveness and vaccination drive in India. We found that people mostly had neutral sentiments for the former topic while for the latter, overall sentiment polarity was negative, reflecting peoples' mistrust in the COVID-19 vaccine.
Subject(s)
COVID-19ABSTRACT
The World Health Organization recognized SARS-CoV-2 as a public health concern and declared it as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Over 12 million people have been affected across several countries since it was first recognized. SARS-CoV-2 is thought to commonly spread via respiratory droplets formed while talking, coughing, and sneezing of an infected patient. As several cases, with an absence of travel history to the majorly affected areas were identified, a strong possibility of community transmission could have been possible. Broadly, two modes of transmission of COVID-19 exist-direct and indirect. The direct mode includes (1) transmission via aerosols formed via surgical and dental procedures and/or in the form of respiratory droplet nuclei; (2) other body fluids and secretions, for example, feces, saliva, urine, semen, and tears; and (3) mother-to-child. Indirect transmission may occur via (1) fomites or surfaces (e.g., furniture and fixtures) present within the immediate environment of an infected patient and (2) objects used on the infected person (e.g., stethoscope or thermometer). As many of these modes may be underestimated, it is necessary to emphasize and illustrate them. The goal of this paper is to briefly review how SARS-CoV-2 is shown to transmit via various modes and propose measures to reduce the risk of spread within the population and operating personnel.