scholarly journals Monitoring People’s Emotions and Symptoms from Arabic Tweets during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Al-Laith ◽  
Mamdouh Alenezi

Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) started from Wuhan, China, in late December 2019. It swept most of the world’s countries with confirmed cases and deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus a pandemic on 11 March 2020 due to its widespread transmission. A public health crisis was declared in specific regions and nation-wide by governments all around the world. Citizens have gone through a wide range of emotions, such as fear of shortage of food, anger at the performance of governments and health authorities in facing the virus, sadness over the deaths of friends or relatives, etc. We present a monitoring system of citizens’ concerns using emotion detection in Twitter data. We also track public emotions and link these emotions with COVID-19 symptoms. We aim to show the effect of emotion monitoring on improving people’s daily health behavior and reduce the spread of negative emotions that affect the mental health of citizens. We collected and annotated 5.5 million tweets in the period from January to August 2020. A hybrid approach combined rule-based and neural network techniques to annotate the collected tweets. The rule-based technique was used to classify 300,000 tweets relying on Arabic emotion and COVID-19 symptom lexicons while the neural network was used to expand the sample tweets that were annotated using the rule-based technique. We used long short-term memory (LSTM) deep learning to classify all of the tweets into six emotion classes and two types (symptom and non-symptom tweets). The monitoring system shows that most of the tweets were posted in March 2020. The anger and fear emotions have the highest number of tweets and user interactions after the joy emotion. The results of user interaction monitoring show that people use likes and replies to interact with non-symptom tweets while they use re-tweets to propagate tweets that mention any of COVID-19 symptoms. Our study should help governments and decision-makers to dispel people’s fears and discover new symptoms associated with the symptoms that were declared by the WHO. It can also help in the understanding of people’s mental and emotional issues to address them before the impact of disease anxiety becomes harmful in itself.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Al-Laith ◽  
Mamdouh Alenezi

BACKGROUND COVID-19 started from Wuhan, China, in late December 2019, and is caused by the Corona Virus. It swept most of the world countries with confirmed cases and deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the virus as a pandemic on March 11th, 2020 due to its widespread transmission. A public health crisis was declared in specific regions and notional wide by governments all around the world. Citizens go through a wide range of emotions, such as fear of shortage of food, Anger at the performance of governments and health authorities in facing the virus, sadness over the death of a friend or relative, etc. OBJECTIVE We present a monitoring system of citizen’s concerns using emotion detection in Twitter data. We also track public emotions and link these emotions with COVID-19 symptoms. We aim to show the effect of emotion monitoring on improving people's daily health behavior and reduce the spread of negative emotions that affect the mental health of the citizens. METHODS We use Twitter API to collect and annotate 5.5M tweets in the period from January 2020 to August 2020. Two deep learning classifiers namely Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) employed to classify all tweets into six emotion classes (Anger, Disgust,Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Surprise) and two types (symptom and non-symptom tweets). RESULTS Our LSTM based text classification model outperforms the CNN model in emotion and symptom classification. We achieved a significant performance on multiclass classification (emotion detection) with an accuracy result of 91%. We also achieved an accuracy result of 88% on binary classification (symptom detection). The monitoring system shows that most of the tweets were posted in March. The anger and fear emotions have the highest number of tweets and user interactions after the joy emotion. The results of user interaction monitoring show that people use likes and replies to interact with non-symptom tweets while they use re-tweets to propagate tweets that mention any of the COVID-19 symptoms. CONCLUSIONS The study helps the governments and decision-makers to prove or deny these feelingsand discover other symptoms associated with the symptoms that were declared by the WHO. It can also help in the understanding of the people’s mental and emotional issues to address them before the impact of disease anxiety becomes harmful in itself.


Author(s):  
Diane Ashiru-Oredope ◽  
◽  
Amy Hai Yan Chan ◽  
Omotayo Olaoye ◽  
Victoria Rutter ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The declaration of COVID-19 a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020 marked the beginning of a global health crisis of an unprecedented nature and scale. The approach taken by countries across the world varied widely, however, the delivery of frontline healthcare was consistently recognised as being central to the pandemic response. This study aimed to identify and explore the issues currently facing pharmacy teams across Commonwealth countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also evaluates pharmacy professionals’ understanding of key knowledge areas from the COVID-19 webinar hosted by the Commonwealth Pharmacists’ Association (CPA). Method A quantitative survey-based approach was adopted, using a 32-item questionnaire developed from the literature on pharmacy and pandemic response. The survey was hosted on Survey Monkey and pilot tested. The final survey was disseminated by CPA member organisations. A 6-item online questionnaire was sent via email to all attendees of CPA's COVID-19 webinar. Descriptive statistics on frequency distributions and percentages were used to analyse the responses. Data were analysed using Microsoft® Excel (2010). Results There were 545 responses from pharmacy professionals across 31/54 Commonwealth countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific. Majority of the respondents reported being at least somewhat worried (90%) and more than 65% were very worried or extremely about the impact of COVID-19 on them personally and professionally. Nearly two-thirds of respondents stated finding it somewhat difficult or very difficult to work effectively during the pandemic. Challenges mostly faced by pharmacy professionals working remotely included; general anxiety about the impact of COVID-19 on their lives (12%), and difficulties in communicating with their co-workers (12%). Most pharmacy professionals had not previously been actively involved in a global health emergency (82%) nor obtained training on global/public health emergency preparedness (62%). Between 45 and 97% of the COVID-19 webinar attendees provided the correct answers to post-webinar questions, suggesting some improvement in knowledge. Conclusion Our study confirms pharmacy professionals’ concerns about practice during a pandemic and provides preliminary data on the challenges and learning needs of the profession. The CPA has since acted on these findings, providing ongoing opportunities to develop and refine resources for the profession as the pandemic evolves. Pharmacy professionals have also demonstrated improved knowledge on the management of COVID-19 and resources available for professionals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (07) ◽  
pp. 1085-1090
Author(s):  
Harsh Vikram Arora ◽  

The COVID19 pandemic which came unprecedentedly has brought forward a lot of confusion and unrest in the world. There are a lot of changes with regard to the global landscape in multiple ways. SARS-CoV-2 is the primary virus, which is the root contributor to the COVID19 outbreak, which started in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019. It did not take much time to spread across the world. This pandemic has resulted in a universal health crisis, along with a major decline in the global economy. One of the major reasons for the fluctuation in the stock price is supply and demand. When the number of people who want to sell their stocks outnumbers those who want to purchase it, the stock price drops. Due to the result in the gap, the financial markets will suffer in the short duration, but in the long run, markets will correct themselves and would increase again. There is a sharp decline in the stock price because of the pandemic. The current scenario has resulted in a world health crisis which has contributed to global and economic crises. Almost all financial markets across the world have been affected by the recent health crisis, with stock and bond values falling gradually and severely. In the United States, the Dow Jones and S& P 500 indices have fallen by more than 20%. The Shanghai Stock Exchange and the New York Dow Jones Stock Exchange both indicate that they had a significant impact on China’s and the United States’ financial markets. The primary purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of COVID19 on stock markets. The rapid spread of the virus has left a major impact on the global financial markets. There is a link between the pandemic and the stock market, and this has been studied in this paper. Along with it, an attempt is taken to compare stock price returns in pre-COVID19 and post-COVID19 scenarios. The stock market in India faced uncertainty during the pandemic, according to the findings.


Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on the 11th March 2020. COVID-19 has a wide range of effects. Increased Covid-19 infection is a major risk factor due to human unconsciousness and disobedience. The effects are increasing gradually. Therefore, the Bangladesh government has imposed a lockdown, but the outcome is adverse to this lockdown. It has shown us the real situation in our economic, social, education, service, and health sectors. It reveals, in particular, that, as a result of Covid-19, our health sector, which is a basic human need, has entirely broken down, and that, as a result of the epidemic, our educational system has also been impacted. Generally speaking, the education sector will suffer significant damage. Our main purpose in this paper is to show the impact of Covid-19 on different sectors of our country.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Ashiru-Oredope ◽  
Amy Chan ◽  
Omotayo Olaoye ◽  
Victoria Rutter ◽  
Zaheer-Ud-Din Babar ◽  
...  

Abstract BackgroundThe declaration of COVID-19 a pandemic by the World Health Organisation on the 11March 2020 marked the beginning of a global health crisis of an unprecedented natureand scale. The approach taken by countries across the world varied widely, however,the delivery of frontline healthcare was consistently recognised as being central to thepandemic response. This study aimed to identify and explore the issues currentlyfacing pharmacy teams across Commonwealth countries during the COVID-19pandemic. The study also evaluates pharmacy professionals’ understanding of keyknowledge areas from the COVID-19 webinar hosted by the CommonwealthPharmacists’ Association ( CPA) on 5 th June 2020.MethodA quantitative survey-based approach was adopted, using a 32-item questionnairedeveloped from the literature on pharmacy and pandemic response. The survey washosted on Survey Monkey and pilot tested. The final survey was disseminated by CPAmember organisations. A 6-item online questionnaire was sent via email to allattendees of CPA's COVID-19 webinar. Descriptive statistics on frequency distributionsand percentages were used to analyse the responses. Data were analysed usingMicrosoft® Excel (2010).ResultsThere were 545 responses from pharmacy professionals across 31/54 commonwealthcountries in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific. Majority of therespondents reported being at least somewhat worried (90%) and more than 65% werevery worried or extremely about the impact of COVID-19 on them personally andprofessionally. Nearly two-thirds of respondents stated finding it somewhat difficult orvery difficult to work effectively during the pandemic. Challenges mostly faced bypharmacy professionals working remotely included; general anxiety about the impact ofCOVID-19 on their lives (12%), and difficulties in communicating with their co-workers(12%). Most pharmacy professionals had not previously been actively involved in aglobal health emergency (82%) nor obtained training on global/public healthemergency preparedness (62%). Between 45% to 97% of the COVID-19 webinarattendees provided the correct answers to post-webinar questions, suggesting someimprovement in knowledge.ConclusionOur study confirms pharmacy professional’s concerns about practice during apandemic and provides preliminary data on the challenges and learning needs of theprofession. The CPA has since acted on these findings, providing on-goingopportunities to develop and refine resources for the profession as the pandemicevolves. Pharmacy professionals have also demonstrated improved knowledge on themanagement of COVID-19 and resources available for professionals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Al Kusaeri Al Kusaeri

Since the enactment of the COVID-19 pandemic status by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. Massive joint efforts are needed by the world community to fight the spread of the COVID 19 virus so as not to cause more victims. The crisis due to the spread of Covid 19 is not only seen as a health crisis, but affects crises in various sectors of public life, because the impact affects all sectors of life. Facing this, in addition to medical efforts by finding anti-viruses, public awareness of a healthy lifestyle is also needed, namely getting used to behavior following health protocols in carrying out various life activities to inhibit and stop the rate of transmission of Covid 19. Paying attention to the movement of the spread of Covid 19 which runs very fast Therefore, fast public awareness is also needed to get used to following the covid 19 protocol. For this reason, all levels of society must take part in increasing public awareness to carry out various activities by following the Covid 19 protocol including Higher Education, as the efforts that have been carried out by UIN Mataram through Participatory Work Lecture (KKP) activities in 2020


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Azher Uddin ◽  
Bayazid Talukder ◽  
Mohammad Monirujjaman Khan ◽  
Atef Zaguia

The world is facing a pandemic due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), named as per the World Health Organization. COVID-19 is caused by the virus called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was initially discovered in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Later, the virus had spread throughout the world within a few months. COVID-19 has become a global health crisis because millions of people worldwide are affected by this fatal virus. Fever, dry cough, and gastrointestinal problems are the most common signs of COVID-19. The disease is highly contagious, and affected people can easily spread the virus to those with whom they have close contact. Thus, contact tracing is a suitable solution to prevent the virus from spreading. The method of identifying all persons with whom a COVID-19-affected patient has come into contact in the last 2 weeks is called contact tracing. This study presents an investigation of a convolutional neural network (CNN), which makes the test faster and more reliable, to detect COVID-19 from chest X-ray (CXR) images. Because there are many studies in this field, the designed model focuses on increasing the accuracy level and uses a transfer learning approach and a custom model. Pretrained deep CNN models, such as VGG16, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and ResNet50, have been used for deep feature extraction. The performance measurement in this study was based on classification accuracy. The results of this study indicate that deep learning can recognize SARS-CoV-2 from CXR images. The designed model provided 93% accuracy and 98% validation accuracy, and the pretrained customized models such as MobileNetV2 obtained 97% accuracy, InceptionV3 obtained 98%, and VGG16 obtained 98% accuracy, respectively. Among these models, InceptionV3 has recorded the highest accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-305
Author(s):  
Sumbal Javed ◽  
Vijay Kumar Chattu

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to claim lives around the world and, to some extent, reflects the failure of international cooperation. Global health diplomacy (GHD)can be a bridge for international cooperation for tackling public health crises, strengthening health systems through emphasizing universal health coverage for sustainable and equitable development, and rebuilding multilateral organizations. It can be a catalyst for future global health initiatives. Health should not be used as a political tool at the cost of people’s lives, nor should it become a proxy for geopolitics but can be used to diffuse tensions and create a positive environment for political dialogue. Health diplomacy’s focus should be to mitigate inequality by making available diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines as a global public good. The implications for the lack of international cooperation will lead to increased global disparities and inequities as the countries that cannot procure vaccines will find their population more vulnerable to the pandemic’s repercussion. Though the international cooperation on trade has suffered the impact of geopolitical shifts and competition, through engaging in GHD, the governments can align the trade and health policies. Amid this global health crisis, the World Health Organization (WHO) has faced an increase in International Health Regulations violations, limiting its influence and response during this COVID-19 pandemic. Nations need to develop a sense of cooperation that serves as the basis for a mutual strategic trust for international development. The priorities of all the countries should be to find the areas of common interest, common operational overlap on development issues, and resource allocation for this global fight against COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Dalya Abdullah Anwer

Nowadays, image processing is widely utilized in many applications and for various purposes. Scholars proposed and suggested various techniques of image processing. The neural network is one of the main processing techniques, which is a state-of-art method. This paper aims to investigate neural network techniques in the field of image processing. Moreover, medical imaging, as well as increasing trends of utilizing digital medical imaging, has gained huge attention in the health sectors. In this regard, this paper focuses on the effect of neural networks in optimizing medical image processing. In this context, the early diagnosis and detection of the eye have an important role in the avoidance of visual impairment, because of the fact that around 45 million people have visual impairments all over the world, according to the World Health Organization. For this reason, the current paper introduces a new method based on image processing for vascular segmentation based on a morphological active contour. Then, segmentation carried out based on morphological operations, fuzzy c-means, and watershed transform. The output of such segmentation methods was given to conventional neural network. The optimized feature values are then extracted. The threshold value is set to compare these optimized feature values. From this, the best segmentation methods will be obtained.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Molloy

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic on 11 March 2020. This global health crisis demanded a quick, decisive and efficient response by governments to protect lives, curb the spread of the virus and prevent public health systems from being overwhelmed. This report explores the way governments undergoing transitions to peace and democracy have triggered emergency legal frameworks to disable some ordinary (democratic) procedures and set aside standard political and legal accountability mechanisms as part of their Covid-19 response. It also provides information about where elections have been postponed or cancelled, and central governments have assumed enhanced responsibilities, which have often included powers otherwise designated to local or regional governments. While the impacts of both the pandemic and the responses to the contagion have been felt globally, they often have quite different consequences in countries attempting peace and democratic transition processes.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document