WeChat, a Chinese social media, may early detect the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in 2019

Wenjun Wang; Yikai Wang; Xin Zhang; Yaping Li; Xiaoli Jia; Shuangsuo Dang

By exploring daily data from WeChat, a Chinese social media, we found that the frequencies of several keywords related to the SARS-Cov-2 disease behaved abnormally during a period ahead of the outbreak in China, 2019. Of these keywords, Feidian is especially worthy of attention. In 2003, the SARS outbreak caused mass panic among people in China and approximately half of the victims were health care workers [13] . Since then, Chinese physicians are alert to SARS and similar diseases [14] . If the manifestations and chest images indicate viral pneumonia and similar cases occurs in a region during a short time, they naturally think of SARS that is called Feidian in Chinese language. When suspected cases admitted to hospitals, involved physicians may mention Feidian and communicate in WeChat using this word. As showed in the current study, the activity of Feidian in WeChat began to rise on Dec 15, 2019. According to publications of early cases with laboratory-confirmed SARS-Cov-2 infection, five to eleven patients had symptom onset by this day, with the first onset on Dec 1, 2019 [1, 11] . Furthermore, the activity of Feidian persisted at levels higher than those ahead of Dec 15, 2019 and it dramatically rose to a peak on the day of the outbreak announcement. Altogether, WeChat Index for Feidian is a strong warning sign for the . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.