Japan Association for Medical Informatics

[AP1-E2-3-02] Catching Public Opinion of COVID-19 Pandemic in Korea and Japan: Social Network Mining on Twitter

*Hocheol Lee1, Eun bi Noh2, Se Hwan Choi3, Zhao bo1, Eun Woo Nam4 (1. Department of Health Administration, Yonsei University Graduate School, Korea, 2. Department of Public Health, Graduate school of public health, Seoul National University, Korea, 3. Department of Applied Statistics, Yonsei University Graduate School, Korea, 4. Department of Health Administration, College of Health Science, Yonsei University, Korea)

COVID-19, Social Network Mining, Public Opinion

Physical and psychological stress of general public has been accumulated since new COVID-19 confirmed cases continu-ously occur. This study aims to analyze the perceptions and emotions of the public on COVID-19 in Korea and Japan. Therefore, this study is to analyze the frequency of using words in Korean and Japanese tweets in COVID-19, and the change in their interest. A cross-sectional study was conducted in this paper to analyzed Twitter posts from February 1 to April 30 in Korean and Japanese citizens. Python 3.7 library was used to perform this collection. After collecting data, we used Kr-Wordrank, Heat diagram, Word cloud, Rank flowchart analysis in Korea and frequency analysis in Japan. The number of tweets collected was 1,470,673 in Korea and 4,195,457 in Japan. The word trend for every 5 days from February 1st to April 30th in Korea and Japan. The result of Word Cloud, In Korea, ‘COVID-19’, ‘Shinchonji’, ‘Mask’, ‘Daegu’, and ‘Travel’ showed as frequent words. In Japan, ‘COVID-19’, ‘Mask’, ‘Test’, ‘Impact’, and ‘China’ were iden-tified as high-frequency words. We divided into four catego-ries, Social Distancing, Prevention, Issue, and Emotion on Rank flowchart. In Emotion categories, ‘Overcome’ and ‘Support’ increasing from February in Korea. In Japan. ‘Wor-ry’ and ‘Anxiety’ decreased from April 1st. We observed that people's interests in economy were high in both countries which showed their worries on economic downturn by COVID-19.
Therefore, focusing policies toward economic stability is con-siderable. Although interests in prevention increased since April in both countries, it showed that general public began to relieve their worries on COVID-19. Therefore, it is necessary to keep emphasizing their compliances with the COVID-19 precautions.