Human sentiments monitoring during COVID-19 using AI-based modeling.

The whole world is facing health challenges due to wide spread of COVID-19 pandemic. To control the spread of COVID-19, the development of its vaccine is the need of hour. Considering the importance of the vaccines, many industries have put their efforts in vaccine development. The higher immunity against the COVID can be achieved by high intake of the vaccines. Therefore, it is important to analysis the people's behaviour and sentiments towards vaccines. Today is the era of social media, where people mostly share their emotions, experience, or opinions about any trending topic in the form of tweets, comments or posts. In this study, we have used the freely available COVID-19 vaccines dataset and analysed the people reactions on the vaccine campaign using artificial intelligence methods. We used TextBlob() function of python and found out the polarity of the tweets. We applied the BERT model and classify the tweets into negative and positive classes based on their polarity values. The classification results show that BERT has achieved maximum values of precision, recall and F score for both positive and negative sentiment classification.

Intention to vaccinate young children against COVID-19: A large-scale survey of Hong Kong parents.

COVID-19 vaccines (Sinovac and Pfizer/BioNTech) have recently been approved for Hong Kong children. Understanding parental intentions to vaccinate children against COVID-19 is important to the development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine campaign. From a large-scale, geographically representative dataset in Hong Kong (N = 11,141), we examined parents' intentions to vaccinate their children against COVID-19 under three conditions: (1) no policy restrictions, (2) vaccination rate considered for school resumption, and (3) more choices of vaccine. Results showed that levels of vaccine hesitancy in Hong Kong parents are high. Hong Kong parents' intention to vaccinate their children was highest when there were more vaccines to choose from, followed by when vaccination rate was considered to resume school, and when there was no policy restrictions. Finally, Hong Kong parents with higher education backgrounds and family income were less willing to vaccinate their children. Together, these findings indicate that effective vaccines campaign should consider the characteristics and preferences of parents who have little intention to vaccinate within a specific social context.