Tweets on COVID-19 Pandemic in Nigeria: Lesson Learned

Adebisi, Tunde and Asamu, Festus and Ogadimma, Chukwubueze, Arisukwu and Alabi, Oluwatobi and Aregbesola, Ayooluwa (2020) Tweets on COVID-19 Pandemic in Nigeria: Lesson Learned. In: 1st International Conference on Innovation and Sustainable Development (ICISD) 2020, Ota, Nigeria. (In Press)

Text COVID-19 Tweets (1).docx Download (227kB)

Abstract

Summary: Aim & Scope: Communication and Agenda Setting in the Post COVID-19 Era. Purpose of the Study: This study seeks to show the ways Twitter has been used to track the early pandemic detection, to monitor the dissemination of information and to explore the public awareness and attitudes of Nigeria. This is done in order to address the public health surveillance challenges in Nigeria to better inform future efforts to leverage Twitter's public health potential. Problem Addressed: Developing countries, including Nigeria perpetually finds it difficult to proactively and actively monitor disease outbreaks especially in its early stages due to the poor quality of manpower, scarcity of public health data and absence of automated surveillance. Methodology: From February 20 - May 6, 2020, English Tweets mentioning COVID-19 and related keywords were collected in 11 batches via NCapture™ plugin available on Google Chrome. The analysis includes a time series analysis to track the distribution of data and content analysis to analyze the knowledge and attitudes of Nigerians. Results: A total of 67,989 tweets (1,484 unique and 66,505 retweets) citing COVID-19 and related keywords were returned. The Tweets started to emerge on Twitter earlier to the first confirmed case in Nigeria, while maintaining a dangling-upward movement. Matters arising from the tweets include dearth of information on COVID-19, and optimism among others. Owing to the study of a specific dataset of Twitter collected at the earliest stage of the current pandemic in Nigeria, the results provide insight into the intersection of social media and public health surveillance. Recommendations: Results show how helpful Twitter is to educate education in public health. Health organisations and the government may benefit from paying attention to the both amusing and emotional contents from the twitter community in order to formulate a viable policy for treatment and control.

Actions (login required)

View Item