JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Even though COVID-19 is a pandemic, its impact is not only limited to public health but has spanned across economy, education, work style or social relationships. As the COVID-19 studies proliferating in the past two years, whether the studies would yield insights that are relevant to the individuals in the society becomes important.

Objective:

This study focuses on uncovering and tracking the concerns in Japan across the COVID-19 period by investigating Japanese individuals' self-disclosing of life plan disruption on the social media, hence, yielding field evidence of which concerns might warrant further addressing for individuals living in Japan.

Methods:

We have extracted 300,778 tweets using "Corona no-sei (due to COVID-19, because of COVID-19, or considering COVID-19) as a query phrase, which allowed us to identify the activities and life plans disrupted due to COVID-19. The number of tweets compares with the number of COVID-19 cases to analyze the correlation. In addition, we analyze frequent co-occurrence words.

Results:

Our findings showed that while education surfaced as the top concern when Japanese government announced the first state of emergency. We also observed a sudden surge of anxiety about shortage of materials such as toilet paper. While these concerns were relatively short-term concerns, as the pandemic dragged further and more state of emergencies being announced, more concerns about long-term life plans such as career, social relationships, and education started showing.

Conclusions:

Overall, by adding the analysis on "Corona no-sei" to the conventional symptom-based monitoring, we were able to identify the underlying concerns at the peak of the disruption and across the whole time span of the three announcements of state of emergency.