Could Social Media Have Prevented the Pandemic? A Reports Says Possibly
(Thursday, January 28, 2021)
A review of Tweets from the winter season of 2019-2020 originating in Europe show that there was a jump in tweets about cases of pneumonia and unexplained illness across several European countries. Now we know that those were the early COVID-19 cases. Another review of social media messages originating around the same time in China show a similar jump in reports of flu-like and SARS-like infections. These two studies, one appearing in the journal Nature and another by BBC, show a remarkable ability of social media data to identify and track wide-spread infections such as the current pandemic. It is not surprising that people were talking to their friends and connections on social media about their illnesses, but it is worrying that public and non-profit health agencies such as WHO, CDC in the US, NHS in UK and other government agencies either missed the signals or worst-case scenario did not do the most they could have to stop the spread in the early days of the pandemic. Social media data is an available tool to track many healthcare related elements of information, and one would expect that government health agencies would use these to track diseases. General perception is that they do but the two publications this week show that they missed, this time. Part of it could be Chinese government’s extensive efforts to control the information and investigation into the infection but a bigger part is in other agencies missing the signals as a lot of indicators were available outside China. It seems the reason for missing signals by individual countries was the lack of coordination between health agencies leading to delayed measures and cover-ups. The pandemic exposed a big loophole in the global infection tracking processes; hope that this loophole has been patched now.