International Journal of Digital Earth (Dec 2022)

Revealing the linguistic and geographical disparities of public awareness to Covid-19 outbreak through social media

  • Binbin Lin,
  • Lei Zou,
  • Nick Duffield,
  • Ali Mostafavi,
  • Heng Cai,
  • Bing Zhou,
  • Jian Tao,
  • Mingzheng Yang,
  • Debayan Mandal,
  • Joynal Abedin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2022.2070677
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 1
pp. 868 – 889

Abstract

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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, 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? Does significant association exist between the changing Covid-19 awareness and the pandemic outbreak? We established a Twitter data mining framework calculating the Ratio index to quantify and track 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 disparities in awareness than European countries, and awareness in Eastern Europe was higher than in central Europe. Finally, the Ratio index had high correlations with global mortality rate, global case fatality ratio, and country-level mortality rate, with 21-31, 35-42, and 13–18 leading days, respectively. This study yields timely insights into social media use in understanding human behaviors for public health research.

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