Objective

There was a significant delay in compiling a complete list of the symptoms of COVID-19 during the 2020 outbreak of the disease. When there is little information about the symptoms of a novel disease, interventions to contain the spread of the disease would be suboptimal because people experiencing symptoms that are not yet known to be related to the disease may not limit their social activities. Our goal was to understand whether users’ social media postings about the symptoms of novel diseases could be used to develop a complete list of the disease symptoms in a shorter time.

Materials and Methods

We used the Twitter API to download tweets that contained ‘coronavirus’, ‘COVID-19’, and ‘symptom’. After data cleaning, the resulting dataset consisted of over 95,000 unique, English tweets posted between January 17, 2020 and March 15, 2020 that contained references to the symptoms of COVID-19. We analyzed this data using network and time series methods.

Results

We found that a complete list of the symptoms of COVID-19 could have been compiled by mid-March 2020, before most states in the U.S. announced a lockdown and about 75 days earlier than the list was completed on CDC’s website.

Discussion & Conclusion

We conclude that national and international health agencies should use the crowd-sourced intelligence obtained from social media to develop effective symptom surveillance systems in the early stages of pandemics. We propose a high-level framework that facilitates the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information that are posted in various languages and on different social media platforms about the symptoms of novel diseases.

中文翻译：

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沟通时代的沟通不畅：大流行期间症状监测的众包框架

客观的

在 2020 年 COVID-19 疾病爆发期间，编制一份完整的 COVID-19 症状清单出现了重大延误。当关于一种新疾病的症状的信息很少时，控制疾病传播的干预措施将是次优的，因为人们出现尚不清楚与该疾病相关的症状可能不会限制他们的社交活动。我们的目标是了解用户在社交媒体上发布的关于新型疾病症状的帖子是否可用于在更短的时间内开发出完整的疾病症状列表。

材料和方法

我们使用 Twitter API 下载包含“冠状病毒”、“COVID-19”和“症状”的推文。数据清理后，生成的数据集包含 2020 年 1 月 17 日至 2020 年 3 月 15 日期间发布的 95,000 多条独特的英文推文，其中包含对 COVID-19 症状的引用。我们使用网络和时间序列方法分析了这些数据。

结果

我们发现，一份完整的 COVID-19 症状清单本可以在 2020 年 3 月中旬编制完成，当时美国大多数州宣布封锁之前，比该清单在 CDC 网站上完成的时间早了大约 75 天。

讨论与结论

我们的结论是，国家和国际卫生机构应该利用从社交媒体获得的众包情报，在大流行的早期阶段开发有效的症状监测系统。我们提出了一个高级框架，该框架有助于收集、分析和传播以各种语言和不同社交媒体平台发布的有关新型疾病症状的信息。