ABSTRACT
We observed the association of vaccine coverage with the implementation of the Vaccine Pass policy and the intensity of the Omicron pandemic. Vaccine policy and transparent information dissemination are indispensable interventions promoting vaccination uptake.
ABSTRACT
Social media are the influential Internet community for general netizens to disseminate information, views, and opinions extensively. Recently, the research on Sentiment analysis has intensified due to the vast amount of data obtained from these numerous social networking platforms. During this COVID-19 pandemic, one of the great social networking sites viz. Twitter has experienced a significant increase in online posts and reviews concerning COVID-19 related tweets. In the view of Twitter, the spread of news concerning coronavirus variants has impacted many aspects of the public by providing messages around different issues and opinions to its potential users. In this study, we have used Twitter as a source of data for searching the index keywords and hashtag versions for the terms like "Pandemic”, "Coronavirus”, "COVID-19”, "SARS-CoV-2”, and "Omicron”, and we have examined the psychological and emotional impact it had on the public. This paper provides analytical information about people's perceptions of coronavirus (tweets were collected from March 2020 to December 2021). With those tweets, sentiment analysis was performed using the TextBlob text processing python module to acquire the people's subjective data (opinions and feelings) polarity concerning the effects of coronavirus. Furthermore, for effective text classification, we have applied classification methodologies like Support Vector Machine (SVM), K Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Logistic Regression (LR), and Decision Tree (DT). The SVM concerning feature extraction produced the results with 99.49% accuracy. This study assists the government organizations in attaining COVID-19 insights by implying public mental health sentiments in social networks. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: Shanghai, a mega-city with a population of 25 million, was becoming the first city in mainland China to erupt in the Omicron pandemic. The pandemic and the quarantine measures of whole city static management brought out big challenges for the population. This study sought to examine the psychological impact of such quarantine measures. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in China between April 8 to April 14, 2022. The survey contained inventories of stress perception, emotion states, duration of quarantine, and demographic characteristics. A total of 1,051 participants in Shanghai who were quarantined at home were included by random sampling. Results: We found moderate-to-mild perceived stress (3.248±1.936) and emotion states (3.453±2.094). Individuals with high negative emotions had high levels of perceived stress. Specifically, the population aged 30-49, female, with higher household income, staying with the elderly or children, were more likely to report high stress and negative emotion. Hierarchical regression and the further path analysis indicated that emotion states partially mediated the relationship between quarantined days at home and perceived stress. Conclusion: There was a moderate-to-mild level of perceived stress and emotion when quarantined at home for an average of 20 days in Shanghai. The present findings implicated more positive emotion then less stress perception at the same duration of quarantine. It was suggested to consider the measures taken to construct positive emotions for the public to overcome negativity and bring out a virtuous circle to thrive, if the quarantine has to be continued for preventing the pandemic.