Evaluating Polarity Trend Amidst the Coronavirus Crisis in Peoples’ Attitudes toward the Vaccination Drive

Rakhi Batra,Abdul Ghafoor,Ali Shariq Imran,Sarang Shaikh,Sher Muhammad Daudpota,Zenun Kastrati

doi:10.3390/su13105344

Rakhi Batra, Abdul Ghafoor + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13105344

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Abstract

It has been more than a year since the coronavirus (COVID-19) engulfed the whole world, disturbing the daily routine, bringing down the economies, and killing two million people across the globe at the time of writing. The pandemic brought the world together to a joint effort to find a cure and work toward developing a vaccine. Much to the anticipation, the first batch of vaccines started rolling out by the end of 2020, and many countries began the vaccination drive early on while others still waiting in anticipation for a successful trial. Social media, meanwhile, was bombarded with all sorts of both positive and negative stories of the development and the evolving coronavirus situation. Many people were looking forward to the vaccines, while others were cautious about the side-effects and the conspiracy theories resulting in mixed emotions. This study explores users’ tweets concerning the COVID-19 vaccine and the sentiments expressed on Twitter. It tries to evaluate the polarity trend and a shift since the start of the coronavirus to the vaccination drive across six countries. The findings suggest that people of neighboring countries have shown quite a similar attitude regarding the vaccination in contrast to their different reactions to the coronavirus outbreak.

Highlights

COVID-19 is an infectious disease and the first case was reported in December 2019 in
Researchers have stated that the COVID-19 variant first time reported in the United Kingdom (UK)
This section starts with explanation of our process of collecting tweets related to COVID-19 during the second wave of the coronavirus

Summary

Introduction

COVID-19 is an infectious disease and the first case was reported in December 2019 in. It rapidly spread around the globe and declared as pandemic on 11. March 2020 by World Health Organization (WHO) As of March 2021, the pandemic infected 123,868,982 people and 2,727,738 deaths have been reported around the globe according to Worldometer (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, accessed on March 2021). Mapping-coronavirus-infections-across-the-globe, accessed on 25 March 2021) as shown in the Figure 1. On 14 December 2020, UK authorities notified the WHO about the coronavirus variant and initial studies investigated this variant may spread rapidly people to people. Researchers have stated that the COVID-19 variant first time reported in the UK is up to 100 percent more fatal than earlier strains

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