During a disease outbreak, timely non-medical interventions are critical in preventing the disease from growing into an epidemic and ultimately a pandemic. However, taking quick measures requires the capability to detect the early warning signs of the outbreak. This work collects Twitter posts surrounding the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic expressing the most common symptoms of COVID-19 including cough and fever, geolocated to the United States. Through examining the variation in Twitter activities at the state level, we observed a temporal lag between the rises in the number of symptom reporting tweets and officially reported positive cases which varies between 5 to 19 days.
@article{arxiv.2005.00475,
title = {Early Outbreak Detection for Proactive Crisis Management Using Twitter Data: COVID-19 a Case Study in the US},
author = {Erfaneh Gharavi and Neda Nazemi and Faraz Dadgostari},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00475},
year = {2020}
}