An ""Infodemic"": Leveraging High-Volume Twitter Data to Understand Public Sentiment for the COVID-19 Outbreak

Richard J. Medford; Sameh N. Saleh; Andrew Sumarsono; Trish M. Perl; Christoph U. Lehmann

Global infectious outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic may become the culture medium for a societal illness: social segregation and racial prejudice. As previously reported in other outbreaks, such as EV [21] and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) [22] , there is significant discrimination surrounding acquisition of these viruses toward individuals based on ethnicity and race. Similarly, we found a substantial number of tweets related to racial prejudice in our study sample. The increase of these tweets mirrored the rise in newly confirmed COVID-19 cases. Their overall rate was relatively low at 0.54%, but taken at scale, this is concerning as the press has reported racist or discriminating behavior towards Chinese-American and other Asian-American citizens [23, 24] .