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Register a new userHow Epidemic Psychology Works on Twitter: Evolution of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S
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Added by
Luca Maria Aiello
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Disruptions resulting from an epidemic might often appear to amount to chaos but, in reality, can be understood in a systematic way through the lens of epidemic psychology. According to Philip Strong, the founder of the sociological study of epidemic infectious diseases, not only is an epidemic biological; there is also the potential for three psycho-social epidemics: of fear, moralization, and action. This work empirically tests Strongs model at scale by studying the use of language of 122M tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic posted in the U.S. during the whole year of 2020. On Twitter, we identified three distinct phases. Each of them is characterized by different regimes of the three psycho-social epidemics. In the refusal phase, users refused to accept reality despite the increasing number of deaths in other countries. In the anger phase (started after the announcement of the first death in the country), users fear translated into anger about the looming feeling that things were about to change. Finally, in the acceptance phase, which began after the authorities imposed physical-distancing measures, users settled into a new normal for their daily activities. Overall, refusal of accepting reality gradually died off as the year went on, while acceptance increasingly took hold. During 2020, as cases surged in waves, so did anger, re-emerging cyclically at each wave. Our real-time operationalization of Strongs model is designed in a way that makes it possible to embed epidemic psychology into real-time models (e.g., epidemiological and mobility models).
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COVID-19 has resulted in a worldwide pandemic, leading to lockdown policies and social distancing. The pandemic has profoundly changed the world. Traditional methods for observing these historical events are difficult because sending reporters to areas with many infected people can put the reporters lives in danger. New technologies are needed for safely observing responses to these policies. This paper reports using thousands of network cameras deployed worldwide for the purpose of witnessing activities in response to the policies. The network cameras can continuously provide real-time visual data (image and video) without human efforts. Thus, network cameras can be utilized to observe activities without risking the lives of reporters. This paper describes a project that uses network cameras to observe responses to governments policies during the COVID-19 pandemic (March to April in 2020). The project discovers over 30,000 network cameras deployed in 110 countries. A set of computer tools are created to collect visual data from network cameras continuously during the pandemic. This paper describes the methods to discover network cameras on the Internet, the methods to collect and manage data, and preliminary results of data analysis. This project can be the foundation for observing the possible second wave in fall 2020. The data may be used for post-pandemic analysis by sociologists, public health experts, and meteorologists.
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