Analysis of Twitter Conversation on COVID-19 Pandemic in Africa 2019-2020

Abstract

Background: Communication about COVID-19 pandemic has a huge impact on coordination, control and mitigation efforts against the disease. Patterns and trends of COVID-19 pandemic conversations amongst African tweeps between the year 2019 and 2020 was studied. This study aimed to determine the impact of Twitter COVID-19 information dissemination on attitudes, behaviour and decision making during the pandemic. Subjects and Method: This was a cohort study with combined quantitative and qualitative approach. This study was conducted in Africa, from December 2019 to December 2020. The quantitative approach was founded on data mining and data analytics research approach, applying measurements in terms of counts, numbers and frequencies while qualitative approach was founded on Natural Language Processing (NPL) algorithm to extract themes/topics and further applying sentiment analysis to a body of large textual data.