No Arabic abstract
Context. The lockdown orders established in multiple countries in response to the Covid-19 pandemics are arguably one of the most widespread and deepest shock experienced by societies in recent years. Studying their impact trough the lens of social media offers an unprecedented opportunity to understand the susceptibility and the resilience of human activity patterns to large-scale exogenous shocks. Firstly, we investigate the changes that this upheaval has caused in online activity in terms of time spent online, themes and emotion shared on the platforms, and rhythms of content consumption. Secondly, we examine the resilience of certain platform characteristics, such as the daily rhythms of emotion expression. Data. Two independent datasets about the French cyberspace: a fine-grained temporal record of almost 100 thousand YouTube videos and a collection of 8 million Tweets between February 17 and April 14, 2020. Findings. In both datasets we observe a reshaping of the circadian rhythms with an increase of night activity during the lockdown. The analysis of the videos and tweets published during lockdown shows a general decrease in emotional contents and a shift from themes like work and money to themes like death and safety. However, the daily patterns of emotions remain mostly unchanged, thereby suggesting that emotional cycles are resilient to exogenous shocks.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, National governments have applied lockdown restrictions to reduce the infection rate. We perform a massive analysis on near real-time Italian data provided by Facebook to investigate how lockdown strategies affect economic conditions of individuals and local governments. We model the change in mobility as an exogenous shock similar to a natural disaster. We identify two ways through which mobility restrictions affect Italian citizens. First, we find that the impact of lockdown is stronger in municipalities with higher fiscal capacity. Second, we find a segregation effect, since mobility restrictions are stronger in municipalities for which inequality is higher and where individuals have lower income per capita.
The declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic has largely amplified the spread of related information on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and WeChat.Unlike the previous studies which focused on how to detect the misinformation or fake news related toCOVID-19, we investigate how the disease and information co-evolve in the population. We focus onCOVID-19and its information during the period when the disease was widely spread in China, i.e., from January 25th to March 24th, 2020. We first explore how the disease and information co-evolve via the spatial analysis of the two spreading processes. We visualize the geo-location of both disease and information at the province level and find that disease is more geo-localized compared to information. We find a high correlation between the disease and information data, and also people care about the spread only when it comes to their neighborhood. Regard to the content of the information, we find that positive messages are more negatively correlated with the disease compared to negative and neutral messages. Additionally, we introduce machine learning algorithms, i.e., linear regression and random forest, to further predict the number of infected using different disease spatial related and information-related characteristics. We obtain that the disease spatial related characteristics of nearby cities can help to improve the prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, information-related characteristics can also help to improve the prediction performance, but with a delay, i.e., the improvement comes from using, for instance, the number of messages 10 days ago, for disease prediction. The methodology proposed in this paper may shed light on new clues of emerging infections
A novel coronavirus originated from Wuhan, China in late December 2019 has now affected almost all countries worldwide. Pakistan reported its first case in late February. The country went to lockdown after three weeks since the first case, when the total number of cases were over 880. Pakistan imposed a lockdown for more than a month which slowed the spread of COVID 19 effectively, however in late April relaxation in lockdown was allowed by the government in stages to lift the strain on the economy. In this study, the data has been analyzed from daily situation reports by the National Institute of Health Pakistan and the effects of initial strict lockdown and later smart lockdown have been studied. Our analysis showed a 13.14 Percentage increase in cases before lockdown which drops down to 6.55 percent during the lockdown. It proved the effectiveness of lockdown. However, the Percentage Increase in case grows up to 7.24 during a smart lockdown. If it continues to rise in this manner, Pakistan may need to enter again into a strict second lockdown.
New York has become one of the worst-affected COVID-19 hotspots and a pandemic epicenter due to the ongoing crisis. This paper identifies the impact of the pandemic and the effectiveness of government policies on human mobility by analyzing multiple datasets available at both macro and micro levels for the New York City. Using data sources related to population density, aggregated population mobility, public rail transit use, vehicle use, hotspot and non-hotspot movement patterns, and human activity agglomeration, we analyzed the inter-borough and intra-borough moment for New York City by aggregating the data at the borough level. We also assessed the internodal population movement amongst hotspot and non-hotspot points of interest for the month of March and April 2020. Results indicate a drop of about 80% in peoples mobility in the city, beginning in mid-March. The movement to and from Manhattan showed the most disruption for both public transit and road traffic. The city saw its first case on March 1, 2020, but disruptions in mobility can be seen only after the second week of March when the shelter in place orders was put in effect. Owing to people working from home and adhering to stay-at-home orders, Manhattan saw the largest disruption to both inter- and intra-borough movement. But the risk of spread of infection in Manhattan turned out to be high because of higher hotspot-linked movements. The stay-at-home restrictions also led to an increased population density in Brooklyn and Queens as people were not commuting to Manhattan. Insights obtained from this study would help policymakers better understand human behavior and their response to the news and governmental policies.
Using a random 10% sample of tweets authored from 2019-09-01 through 2020-04-30, we analyze the dynamic behavior of words (1-grams) used on Twitter to describe the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Across 24 languages, we find two distinct dynamic regimes: One characterizing the rise and subsequent collapse in collective attention to the initial Coronavirus outbreak in late January, and a second that represents March COVID-19-related discourse. Aggregating countries by dominant language use, we find that volatility in the first dynamic regime is associated with future volatility in new cases of COVID-19 roughly three weeks (average 22.49 $pm$ 3.26 days) later. Our results suggest that surveillance of change in usage of epidemiology-related words on social media may be useful in forecasting later change in disease case numbers, but we emphasize that our current findings are not causal or necessarily predictive.