Linking Tweets Towards Geo-Localized Policies: COVID-19 Perspective.

COVID-19 pandemic is taking a toll on the social, economic, and psychological well-being of people. During this pandemic period, people have utilized social media platforms (e.g., Twitter) to communicate with each other and share their concerns and updates. In this study, we analyzed nearly 25M COVID-19 related tweets generated from 20 different countries and 28 states of USA over a month. We leveraged sentiment analysis and topic modeling over this collection and clustered different geolocations based on their sentiment. Our analysis identified 3 geo-clusters (country- and US state-based) based on public sentiment and discovered 15 topics that could be summarized under three main themes: government actions, medical issues, and people's mood during the home quarantine. The proposed computational pipeline has adequately captured the Twitter population's emotion and sentiment, which could be linked to government/policy makers' decisions and actions (or lack thereof). We believe that our analysis pipeline could be instrumental for the policymakers in sensing the public emotion/support with respect to the interventions/actions taken, for example, by the government instrumentality.

Analyzing Predictors of Control Measures and Psychosocial Problems Associated with COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Eight Countries.

COVID-19 has harshly impacted communities globally. This study provides relevant information for creating equitable policy interventions to combat the spread of COVID-19. This study aims to predict the knowledge, attitude, and practice (KAP) of the COVID-19 pandemic at a global level to determine control measures and psychosocial problems. A cross-sectional survey was conducted from July to October 2020 using an online questionnaire. Questionnaires were initially distributed to academicians worldwide. These participants distributed the survey among their social, professional, and personal groups. Responses were collected and analyzed from 67 countries, with a sample size of 3031. Finally, based on the number of respondents, eight countries, including Bangladesh, China, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, the United States, and Zambia were rigorously analyzed. Specifically, questionnaire responses related to COVID-19 accessibility, behavior, knowledge, opinion, psychological health, and susceptibility were collected and analyzed. As per our analysis, age groups were found to be a primary determinant of behavior, knowledge, opinion, psychological health, and susceptibility scores. Gender was the second most influential determinant for all metrics except information about COVID-19 accessibility, for which education was the second most important determinant. Respondent profession was the third most important metric for all scores. Our findings suggest that health authorities must promote health educations, implement related policies to disseminate COVID-19-awareness that can prevent and control the spread of COVID-19 infection.