In.To. COVID-19 socio-epidemiological co-causality

Abstract

Abstract Social media can forecast disease dynamics, but infoveillance remains focused on infection spread, with little consideration of media content reliability and its relationship to behavior-driven epidemiological outcomes. Sentiment-encoded social media indicators have been poorly developed for expressed text to forecast healthcare pressure and infer population risk-perception patterns. Here we introduce Infodemic Tomography (InTo) as the first web-based interactive infoveillance cybertechnology that forecasts and visualizes spatio-temporal sentiments and healthcare pressure as a function of social media positivity (i.e., Twitter here), considering both epidemic information and potential misinformation. Information spread is measured on volume and retweets, and the Value of Misinformation (VoMi) is introduced as the impact on forecast accuracy where misinformation has the highest dissimilarity in information dynamics. We validated InTo for COVID-19 in New Delhi and Mumbai by inferring distinct socio-epidemiological risk-perception patterns. We forecast weekly hospitalization and cases using ARIMA models and interpolate spatial hospitalization using geostatistical kriging on inferred risk perception curves between tweet positivity and epidemiological outcomes. Geospatial tweet positivity tracks accurately $$\sim $$ ∼ 60 $$\%$$ % of hospitalizations and forecasts hospitalization risk hotspots along risk aversion gradients. VoMi is higher for risk-prone areas and time periods, where misinformation has the highest non-linear predictability, with high incidence and positivity manifesting popularity-seeking social dynamics. Hospitalization gradients, VoMi, effective healthcare pressure and spatial model-data gaps can be used to predict hospitalization fluxes, misinformation, healthcare capacity gaps and surveillance uncertainty. Thus, InTo is a participatory instrument to better prepare and respond to public health crises by extracting and combining salient epidemiological and social surveillance at any desired space-time scale.