Public Reaction to Covid-19 on Twitter: A Thematic Analysis

Emergency situations typically lead to a plethora of public attention on social media platforms like ‘Twitter’. Twitter provides a unique opportunity for public health researchers to analyze untampered information shared during a disease outbreak. Considering the ongoing public health emergency, we conducted a study investigating the public reaction to COVID-19 pandemic around the world using in-depth thematic analysis of Twitter data. A dataset of 212846 tweets was retrieved over a period of seven days (from April 13, 2020, to April 19, 2020) via Twitter Application Programme Interface (API). The following five keywords were used to collect the tweets: “coronavirus”, “covid-19”, “corona”, “covid”, “covid19”. After data filtering and cleaning 6348 tweets were randomly selected for in-depth thematic analysis. Thematic analysis was done manually using a two-level coding guide. A total of six main themes emerged from the analysis: ‘sentiments and feelings’, ‘Information’, ‘General Discussion’, ‘Politics’, ‘Food’, and ‘Sarcasm or humor’. The aforementioned themes were divided into 26 sub-themes. The results of the thematic analysis show that 30.1% of the tweets were regarding ‘sentiments and feelings’, 15.6% were regarding ‘politics’, and 6.5% were related to ‘sarcasm or humor’. The present study is the first study that has analyzed the public response to COVID-19 on Twitter. The study demonstrates that social media platforms (like Twitter) can be used to conduct infodemiological studies related to public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that the results of this study will be of potential interest to policymakers, health authorities, stakeholders, and public health and social science researchers.