Analysis of public reactions to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak on Twitter

Abstract

Purpose: The novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which started in late December 2019, has spread to more than 200 countries As no vaccine is yet available for this pandemic, government and health agencies are taking draconian steps to contain it This pandemic is also trending on social media, particularly on Twitter The purpose of this study is to explore and analyze the general public reactions to the COVID-19 outbreak on Twitter Design/methodology/approach: This study conducts a thematic analysis of COVID-19 tweets through VOSviewer to examine people’s reactions related to the COVID-19 outbreak in the world Moreover, sequential pattern mining (SPM) techniques are used to find frequent words/patterns and their relationship in tweets Findings: Seven clusters (themes) were found through VOSviewer: Cluster 1 (green): public sentiments about COVID-19 in the USA Cluster 2 (red): public sentiments about COVID-19 in Italy and Iran and a vaccine, Cluster 3 (purple): public sentiments about doomsday and science credibility Cluster 4 (blue): public sentiments about COVID-19 in India Cluster 5 (yellow): public sentiments about COVID-19’s emergence Cluster 6 (light blue): public sentiments about COVID-19 in the Philippines Cluster 7 (orange): Public sentiments about COVID-19 US Intelligence Report The most frequent words/patterns discovered with SPM were “COVID-19,” “Coronavirus,” “Chinese virus” and the most frequent and high confidence sequential rules were related to “Coronavirus, testing, lockdown, China and Wuhan ” Research limitations/implications: The methodology can be used to analyze the opinions/thoughts of the general public on Twitter and to categorize them accordingly Moreover, the categories (generated by VOSviewer) can be correlated with the results obtained with pattern mining techniques Social implications: This study has a significant socio-economic impact as Twitter offers content posting and sharing to billions of users worldwide Originality/value: According to the authors’ best knowledge, this may be the first study to carry out a thematic analysis of COVID-19 tweets at a glance and mining the tweets with SPM to investigate how people reacted to the COVID-19 outbreak on Twitter © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited