JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Since the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the lockdown measures went hand-in-hand, it is difficult to distinguish how public opinion reacted to the lockdown measures from the reactions to COVID-19.

Objective:

We analyze the causal effect of COVID-19 lockdown policies on sentiment and uncertainty using the Italian lockdown in February 2020 as a quasi-experiment. The communities inside and just outside the lockdown area were equally confronted with COVID-19 at the time of the implementation of the policy, allowing for a form of random distribution of the lockdown. Moreover, the two areas had balanced socioeconomic and demographic characteristics before the lockdown, indicating that the definition of the boundaries of the area under strict lockdown approximates a randomized experiment. This allows us to identify the causal effects of the lockdown on public emotions, disentangling the changes due to the policy itself from the changes induced by the spread of the new virus.

Methods:

We use Twitter data, natural language models (N = 24,261), and a difference-in-differences approach to compare sentiment changes inside (n=1,567) and outside (n=22,694) the lockdown areas before and after the start of the lockdown. The tweets are divided into four categories — economy, health, politics and lockdown policy — to analyze the corresponding emotional reactions.

Results:

We find that the lockdown had no significant effect on economic uncertainty (b=0.005, SE=0.007, t(125)=0.70, P =.48) or negative economic sentiment (b=-0.011, SE=0.0089, t(125)=-1.32, P =.19), but increased uncertainty about health (b=0.036, SE=0.0065, t(125)=5.55, P<.001) and lockdown policy (b=0.026, SE=0.006, t(125)=4.47, P<.001) and negative sentiment towards politics (b=0.025, SE=0.011, t(125)=2.33, P =.02), suggesting that lockdowns have far-reaching externalities beyond health.

Conclusions:

Our findings underscore the need for authorities to use these insights to improve future policies and communication efforts to mitigate uncertainty and social panic.