Abstract
COVID-19 caused an unprecedented public health crisis and was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020, by the World Health Organization. The Taiwanese government’s early deployment mitigated the effect of the pandemic, yet the breakout in May 2021 brought a new challenge. This study focuses on examining Taiwanese newspaper articles regarding the government response before and after the soft lockdown, collecting 125,570 articles reported by three major news channels from 31 December 2019, to 30 June 2021, and splitting them into four stages. Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling and sentiment analysis were used to depict the overall picture of Taiwan’s pandemic. While the news media focused on the impact and shock of the pandemic in the initial stage, prevention measures were more present in the last stage. Then, to focus on the government response indicators, we retrieved 31,089 related news from 125,570 news articles and categorized them into ten indicators, finding the news centered on the fundamental measures that were taken early and that were transformed into advanced measures in the latest and hardest period of the pandemic. Furthermore, this paper examines the temporal distribution of the news related to each indicator with the support of a sentiment analysis of the news’ titles and content, indicating the preparation of Taiwanese society to confront the pandemic.
Highlights
COVID-19 has caused unprecedented global public health crises and was declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, by the World Health Organization (WHO)
Assigning the topic to each article according to probability computed by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we could observe the prevalence of the topics
The newspapers recorded the pandemic from various angles and its impact on society
Summary
COVID-19 has caused unprecedented global public health crises and was declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, by the World Health Organization (WHO). While some countries had achieved high vaccination rates by and were lifting COVID-19 restrictions already in May 2021, Taiwan was still battling its worst outbreak with a so-called soft lockdown being imposed on 11 May 2021, as the government response was to shut down schools, bars and most public facilities, as well as allowing restaurants to only serve takeout. Since the pandemic could have resulted in the breakdown of different dimensions of society [1], it is crucial to figure out how to maintain social functioning and minimize the damage caused by the crises from a sustainable development perspective. Analyzing the rich extant literature—including investigating the topics covered and their sentiments—
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