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JAMIA Explores Self-Reported Covid-19 Symptoms On Twitter As Research Resource

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A new report from the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association looks at Twitter and tweeted instances of self-reported Covid-19 symptoms. The JAMIA study also compares symptom distributions across other studies to create a “symptom lexicon” for future research.

In the study, JAMIA retrieved tweets using Covid-19 keywords and performed semiautomatic filtering to monitor and collect self-reports of positive-tested Twitter users. The research extracted Covid-19 symptoms mentioned by the users, mapped them with the Unified Medical Language System, and compared the distributions to those reported in earlier studies from clinical settings.

Once all of the data was precisely tabulated, JAMIA identified 203 positive-tested users who reported 1,002 symptoms with 668 unique expressions. The most frequently tweeted symptoms were fever (66.1%), cough (57.9%), body ache (42.7%), fatigue (42.1%), headache (37.4%), and difficulty breathing (36.3%). All of those emerged from users who reported at least one symptom.

In addition to those well-reported major symptoms, other more mild symptoms users reported included loss of sense of smell (28.7%) and loss of sense of taste (28.1%). While those were frequently reported on Twitter, they are not mentioned as often in clinical studies. That would indicate they are not reliable Covid-19 markers. Twitter users might also confuse the minor symptoms as Coronavirus effects amidst other health issues.

This is not the first time medical research institutions turned to Twitter as a way to monitor and catalog both Covid-19 symptoms and how these effects are reported via social media. Earlier this year, University Of Pennsylvania researchers mapped Covid-19 hotspots through Tweets.

Like the JAMIA work, the effort at the Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health looks to pinpoint the next potential hotspots for infection by monitoring, tracking and analyzing tweets in the United States. By watching those messages related to the Coronavirus outbreak, the team maps approaching trouble zones and keeps an eye on the symptoms mentioned.

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