Science and Technology
A group of Italian researchers took to Twitter to track and identify the first cases of Covid-19, using the word “pneumonia.”
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By:
Santiago Gallegos·January 30, 2021
– The research, published in “Scientific Reports”, showed that during January 2020, the publications that contained this word reached 13 thousand tweets. Internet image.
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Using the keyword “pneumonia”, A group of experts from the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, identified publications on the social network in which people, coming from different regions of Europe, expressed a growing concern about pneumonia cases. The tweets came from the countries where the first cases of Covid-19 occurred.
The researchers analyzed the history with the word “pneumonia” in the English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Dutch languages, some of the most widely spoken within the European Union, from December 2019 to March 1, 2020.
The research, published in “Scientific Reports“, Showed that during January 2020, the publications that contained this word reached 13 thousand tweets and one of the regions in which the topic was popularized was in Italy.
The study also reveals that France showed a similar pattern, while Spain, Poland and the United Kingdom experienced a delay of disease identification approximately two weeks.
According to experts, this work demonstrates the deficiency of European governments regarding the identification of warning signs early, given the unprecedented scale of information circulating on networks. Given this, the specialists emphasized the importance of monitoring the social networks, as this could help public health authorities track a disease regrowth or the appearance of some potentially dangerous disease.
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