Analyzing Societal Impact of COVID-19: A Study During the Early Days of the Pandemic

In this paper, we collect and study Twitter communications to understand the societal impact of COVID-19 in the United States during the early days of the pandemic. With infections soaring rapidly, users took to Twitter asking people to self isolate and quarantine themselves. Users also demanded closure of schools, bars, and restaurants as well as lockdown of cities and states. We methodically collect tweets by identifying and tracking trending COVID-related hashtags. We first manually group the hashtags into six main categories, namely, 1) General COVID, 2) Quarantine, 3) Panic Buying, 4) School Closures, 5) Lockdowns, and 6) Frustration and Hope, and study the temporal evolution of tweets in these hashtags. We conduct a linguistic analysis of words common to all hashtag groups and specific to each hashtag group and identify the chief concerns of people as the pandemic gripped the nation (e.g., exploring bidets as an alternative to toilet paper). We conduct sentiment analysis and our investigation reveals that people reacted positively to school closures and negatively to the lack of availability of essential goods due to panic buying. We adopt a state-of-the-art semantic role labeling approach to identify the action words (e.g., fear, test), which capture the actions people are referring to in the tweets. We then leverage an LSTM-based dependency parsing model to analyze the context of the above-mentioned action words (e.g., verb deal is accompanied by nouns such as anxiety, stress, and crisis). Finally, we develop a scalable seeded topic modeling approach to automatically categorize and isolate tweets into hashtag groups and experimentally validate that our topic model provides a grouping similar to our manual grouping. Our study presents a systematic way to construct an aggregated picture of peoples' response to the pandemic and lays the groundwork for future fine-grained linguistic and behavioral analysis.