Revealing the Global Linguistic and Geographical Disparities of Public Awareness to Covid-19 Outbreak through Social Media

TL;DR

This study analyzes global Twitter data to reveal linguistic and geographical disparities in Covid-19 awareness and demonstrates that social media awareness levels can predict pandemic health impacts with lead times of up to 42 days.

Contribution

It introduces a Twitter data mining framework and the Ratio index to quantify and predict Covid-19 awareness and health impacts across different countries and languages.

Findings

Higher awareness in India and Bangladesh's official languages

Greater disparities in Asian countries' awareness compared to Europe

Ratio index accurately predicts mortality and case fatality rates with lead times

Abstract

The Covid-19 has presented an unprecedented challenge to public health worldwide. However, residents in different countries showed diverse levels of Covid-19 awareness during the outbreak and suffered from uneven health impacts. This study analyzed the global Twitter data from January 1st to June 30th, 2020, seeking to answer two research questions. What are the linguistic and geographical disparities of public awareness in the Covid-19 outbreak period reflected on social media? Can the changing pandemic awareness predict the Covid-19 outbreak? We established a Twitter data mining framework calculating the Ratio index to quantify and track the awareness. The lag correlations between awareness and health impacts were examined at global and country levels. Results show that users presenting the highest Covid-19 awareness were mainly those tweeting in the official languages of India and Bangladesh. Asian countries showed more significant disparities in awareness than European countries, and awareness in the eastern part of Europe was higher than in central Europe. Finally, the Ratio index could accurately predict global mortality rate, global case fatality ratio, and country-level mortality rate, with 21-30, 35-42, and 17 leading days, respectively. This study yields timely insights into social media use in understanding human behaviors for public health research.