was 'pneumonia' chatter in europe a covid-19 warning?
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the spanish steps are reflected in a sunglasses of a woman wearing a face mask, as local authorities in the italian capital rome order face coverings to be worn at all times out of doors in an effort to counter rising coronavirus disease (covid-19) infections, in rome, italy october 2, 2020.
reuters/guglielmo mangiapane
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long before the first official announcements of local covid-19 infections were made, there was evidence of widespread concern on social media in several european countries, according to a new study.
researchers at imt school for advanced studies lucca, published in scientific reports, identified increasing concern on twitter about pneumonia cases in seven countries between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. it turns out that whistleblowing came primarily from the geographical regions that eventually turned out to be major breeding grounds for covid-19 infections.
to conduct the study, researchers set up a unique database that contained all mentions of the word “pneumonia” in the seven most spoken languages in the european union (english, french, dutch, german, italian, spanish and polish) that were posted on twitter between december 1, 2014 and march 1, 2020. the word “pneumonia” was chosen because it is the most severe condition induced by covid-19 and because flu season in 2020 was milder than in previous years, meaning it was less likely that the flu was responsible for all the worry posted on twitter.
the world health organization was first informed on december 31, 2020 of a “pneumonia of unknown etymology” which also prompted the authors to use pneumonia as an indicator of early warning signs.
researchers then filtered the tweets and retweets so as not include any links to news articles about the emerging pandemic, otherwise there would not be a way to discern between genuine tweets about pneumonia from tweets elicited by the media coverage.
the analysis uncovered a large increase in tweets mentioning “pneumonia” in early 2020 compared to the same time in 2019, thus revealing hotspots several weeks before the local government announcements of the first infections. more than 13,000 tweets were geo-localized in that period which pinpointed the exact european regions (the lombardia region in italy, madrid, spain, and île de france) where the first covid-19 cases in europe would later be reported.
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the authors then used the same parameters for the study using the words “dry cough” (another major covid-19 symptom) and found similar patterns.
what has become clear through the study is how social media can be an important tool in identifying a possible public health crisis early on. this unique approach to studying the spread of a deadly virus can help policymakers to better identify, geo-localize and manage chains of infection across national borders and linguistic barriers while hopefully paving the way towards a more integrated digital surveillance system.
“our study adds on to the existing evidence that social media can be a useful tool of epidemiological surveillance. they can help intercept the first signs of a new disease, before it proliferates undetected, and also track its spread” said massimo riccaboni, full professor of economics at the imt school, who coordinated the research.
at the same time, it has become painfully obvious how slow governments across the world were to react to the onset of the pandemic. while this study shows how late european nations were to introduce lockdown measures, it took north america several weeks longer.
the first case of covid-19 in canada was reported by health canada on january 25, 2020 in a toronto man who had recently travelled to wuhan, china. the first death, a man in his 80s in a north vancouver nursing home, was recorded on march 8.
ontario and alberta declared states of emergency on march 17, 2020.
so far, there have been more than 747,000 cases of covid-19 across canada with more than 19,000 deaths according to the government of canada.
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