Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Infodemiology
Date Submitted: Jun 30, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 30, 2021 - Aug 25, 2021
Date Accepted: Nov 18, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Temporal variations and spatial disparities in public sentiment towards COVID-19 and preventive practices in the United States
ABSTRACT
Background:
During the pandemic of COVID-19, United States public health authorities and county, state, and federal governments recommended or ordered certain preventative practices, such as wearing masks, to reduce the spread of the disease. However, individuals had divergent reactions to these preventive practices.
Objective:
The purpose of the study was to understand the variations of public sentiment towards COVID-19 and the recommended or ordered preventive practices from the temporal and spatial perspectives and investigate how the variations in public sentiment are related to geographical and socioeconomic factors.
Methods:
The authors leveraged machine learning methods to investigate COVID-19-related Twitter data, from January 21, 2020 to June 12, 2020, to measure the temporal variations and spatial disparities in public sentiment towards both general COVID-19 topics and preventive practices in the United States.
Results:
In the temporal analysis, we found a four-stage pattern from high negative sentiment in the initial stage, to decreasing and stable low negative sentiment in the second and third stage, to the rebound and increase of negative sentiment in the last stage. We also identified that public sentiment to preventive practices was significantly different in urban and rural areas, while poverty rate and unemployment rate were positively associated with negative sentiment to COVID-19 issues.
Conclusions:
The differences between public sentiment towards COVID-19 and the preventive practices imply that actions need to be taken to better manage the initial and the rebound stage in future pandemics. The urban/rural differences should be considered in terms of the communication strategies and decision-makings during a pandemic. This research also presents a framework to investigate time-sensitive public sentiment at the county and state level, which could guide local and state governments, and regional communities, in making decisions and developing policies in crises.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.