JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being of dental professionals and patients has been difficult to track and to quantify. X (previously known as Twitter) proved to be a useful infoveillance tool for tracing the impact of COVID-19 pandemic worldwide.

Objective:

To investigate the use of X to track COVID-19 infections and deaths associated with dental practices.

Methods:

English Tweets reporting infections or deaths associated to dental practice were collected between January 1st 2020 until March 31st 2021. Tweets were searched manually using the XPro search engine (previously known as Tweetdeck) and automatically using a tweet crawler on the X Academic Research API. Queries included keywords on infection and/or death of dental staff and/or patients caused by COVID-19. Tweets registering events on infection or death of dentists, dental staff, and patients as part of their conversation were included.

Results:

A total of 5,641 eligible tweets were retrieved of which 1,583 were deemed relevant after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Of the relevant tweets, 311 described infections at dental practices, where 1,168 infection cases were reported amongst dentists, 134 dental staff and 41 patients. Most common Countries reporting were USA, India, and Canada with an age range of 20-51. Six hundred deaths were described, of which 253 were dentists, 22 dental staff, and 7 patients. Most common Countries reporting were USA, Pakistan, then India with an age range of 23-83.

Conclusions:

The data suggests that analyses of X information in populations of affected areas may provide useful information regarding the impact of a pandemic on the dental profession and demonstrates a correlation with suspected and confirmed infection cases. X could be an effective early predictor of the spread of a particular disease. However, further research is needed to assess its validity. Clinical Trial: N/A