Even before public announcements were made about the first cases of COVID-19 in Europe, there were already signals on social media at the end of January 2020 that something strange was happening. A new study by researchers at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, published in Scientific reports, identified traces that are increasingly concerned about pneumonia cases on posts published on Twitter in seven countries, between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. The analysis of the reports shows that the ‘whistle’ is precisely from the geographical regions where the primary outbreaks later develop.
To conduct the research, the authors first created a unique database with all the messages posted on Twitter with the keyword “pneumonia” in the seven most spoken languages of the European Union – English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Dutch – from December 2014 to March 1, 2020. The word “pneumonia” was chosen because the disease is the worst condition caused by the SARS-CoV-2, and also because the flu season in 2020 was milder than the previous, so there was no reason to think that it was responsible for all the mention and worries. The researchers made a number of adjustments and corrections to the postings in the database to avoid overestimating the number of tweets mentioning pneumonia between December 2019 and January 2020, i.e. in the weeks between the World Health Organization (WHO)’s announcement first ‘cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology’ was identified – on 31 December 2019 – and the official recognition of COVID19 as a serious communicable disease, on 21 January 2020. In particular, all the tweets and retweets with links to news about the emerging virus was eliminated from the database to exclude the mass media coverage of the emerging pandemic from the count.
The authors’ analysis shows an increase in tweets in which the keyword ‘pneumonia’ was included in the study in most European countries as early as January 2020, indicating a continuing concern and public interest in cases of pneumonia. In Italy, where the first closure measures to contain COVID-19 infections, for example, were introduced on 22 February 2020, the increase in the incidence of pneumonia during the first few weeks of 2020 differs significantly from the rate observed in the same weeks. in 2019. That is, potentially hidden infection hotspots were identified a few weeks before the announcement of the first local source of a COVID-19 infection (February 20, Codogno, Italy). France showed a similar pattern, while Spain, Poland and the United Kingdom saw a two-week delay.
The authors also geo-located more than 13,000 pneumonia-related people in the same period and discovered that it came from exactly the regions where the first cases of infections were later reported, such as the Lombardy region in Italy, Madrid, Spain and Île. of France.
Following the same procedure for the keyword “pneumonia”, the researchers also produced a new data set containing the keyword “dry cough”, one of the other symptoms later associated with COVID-19 syndrome. Even then, they observed the same pattern, namely an abnormal and statistically significant increase in the number of mentions of the word during the weeks leading up to the increase in infections in February 2020.
“Our study contributes to the existing evidence that social media can be a useful tool for epidemiological surveillance. It can help to intercept the first signs of a new disease, before it spreads unnoticed, and also monitor its spread.” , says Massimo Riccaboni, Professor of Economics at the IMT School, who coordinated the research.
This is especially true in a situation like the current pandemic, when expiration of the early warning warning signals has blinded many national governments to the unprecedented scale of the looming public health emergency. In a sequential phase of the pandemic, social media monitoring can help public health authorities recover from the risks of infection, for example by taking stricter measures for social distance where the infections appear to be, or vice versa to to relax other regions. These instruments can also pave the way for an integrated epidemiological surveillance system managed by international health organizations worldwide.
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The paper ‘Early warnings of COVID-19 outbreaks across Europe from social media’ is available after publication at: http: // www.
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