JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, social media has been extensively used to amplify the spread of information and to express personal health-related experiences regarding symptoms, including anosmia and ageusia, two symptoms that have been reported later than other symptoms.

Objective:

Our objective is to investigate to what extent Twitter users reported anosmia and ageusia symptoms in their tweets and to evaluate if these symptoms could have been identified earlier using Twitter rather than the official notice.

Methods:

We extracted French tweets posted between January 1, 2020 and March 31, 2020 containing anosmia or ageusia related keywords. Symptoms were detected using fuzzy matching. The analysis consisted of three parts. First, coverage of anosmia-ageusia symptoms in Twitter and traditional media were compared. Second, two periods of time were considered for random annotation of tweets. The first period corresponded to the early stage and the second one to the rapid spread stage of the epidemic. Each symptom was annotated regarding three modalities: symptom (yes/no), associated with COVID-19 (yes/no/unknown), experienced by someone (yes/no/unknown). Third, we compared the tweets with experienced anosmia or ageusia between the first periods of 2019 and 2020.

Results:

832 (resp. 12,544) tweets containing anosmia (resp. ageusia) related keywords were extracted over the analysis period in 2020. The comparison to traditional media showed a strong correlation without any lag, which suggests an important reactivity of Twitter. The annotation of tweets from 2020 showed that tweets correlating anosmia-ageusia with COVID-19 could be found a few days before the official announcement. However, no association could be found during the first stage of the pandemic. Information about the temporality of symptoms and the psychological impact of these symptoms could be found in the tweets. The comparison between early 2020 and early 2019 showed no difference regarding the volumes of tweets.

Conclusions:

Associations between COVID-19 and anosmia-ageusia could be found on Twitter a few days before the official announcement but not during the early stage of the pandemic. Patients share qualitative information on Twitter regarding anosmia-ageusia symptoms that could be of interest for future analyses.