2019-nCoV disease control and rehabilitation: Insights from twitter analytics

Abstract

Coronaviruses are the large family of viruses and life threatening with the capabilities to cause respiratory related diseases. The current outbreak of 2019-nCoV (novel Coronavirus) is challenging governance authorities and health care systems around the globe. The epidemic of 2019-nCoV is affecting people globally. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current status of disease control and rehabilitation in relation to outbreak of 2019-nCoV. In this regard, the Twitter social media contents are collected, analyzed and interpreted. Using a set of appropriate keywords, 110000 tweets are extracted from Twitter social media. The collected tweets are first pre-processed and then analyzed with a software developed in R language. The discussions on social media in relation to the outbreak of 2019-nCoV involves disease control, rehabilitation and anti-rehabilitation. Expressions involving specific locations revealed that the discussions are more oriented towards antirehabilitation than rehabilitation and disease control. The content analysis also revealed that the outbreak epidemic victimizes those who possess weaker immune system. © 2020 IEEE.