# Towards using Tweet sentiment for infectious disease detection

## TL;DR

This paper explores how sentiment from social media tweets can help detect infectious disease outbreaks, like COVID-19, earlier than traditional methods.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel approach using tweet sentiment for local early warning of infectious disease outbreaks.

## Key findings

- Tweet sentiment showed a significant negative correlation with COVID-19 cases in the U.S. East between June and September 2020.
- Spatiotemporal analysis revealed stronger correlations in specific regions and time periods, suggesting potential for targeted early warning systems.

## Abstract

Social media data has shown potential for identifying infectious disease outbreaks faster than official records of disease incidence. We examine spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal relationships between COVID-19-related microblog sentiment and COVID-19 cases over space and time to investigate whether microblog-derived sentiment can be used for local infectious disease outbreak early warning. Therefore, we measure the sentiment of 56,755,894 COVID-19 related microblogs (tweets) from the microblogging platform X. We group these tweets by county and by calendar week to investigate spatial and temporal correlation between sentiment and observed cases (in the corresponding county and week). Our temporal analysis shows a significant negative correlation between sentiment and cases between June and September 2020. During this time, tweet sentiment could have served as an early warning for new COVID-19 outbreaks. Our spatial analysis shows that the East of the United States exhibits a significant negative correlation between Sentiment and Cases while the West exhibits a significant positive correlation. In these regions, Tweet Sentiment could have been used as an early warning signal for new outbreaks. Our spatiotemporal analysis discovers even stronger correlations in certain regions during certain time periods. If we could understand when, where, and why this correlation is strong, then we may be able to leverage social media as a successful early warning system.