Virus

MNE wrote:što su smanjili testiranje kod vas, zar niste testirali po 20k i kusur do skora?

COVID-19 warnings were on Twitter well before the outbreak of the pandemic

The analysis of the authors shows an increase in tweets mentioning the keyword "pneumonia" in most of the European countries included in the study as early as January 2020, such as to indicate an ongoing concern and public interest in pneumonia cases. In Italy, for example, where the first lock-down measures to contain COVID-19 infections were introduced on 22 February 2020, the increase rate in mentions of pneumonia during the first few weeks of 2020 differs substantially from the rate observed in the same weeks in 2019. That is to say that potentially hidden infection hotspots were identified several weeks before the announcement of the first local source of a COVID-19 infection (20 February, Codogno, Italy). France exhibited a similar pattern, whereas Spain, Poland, and the UK witnessed a delay of 2 weeks.

The authors also geo-localized over 13,000 pneumonia-related tweets in this same period, and discovered that they came exactly from the regions where the first cases of infections were later reported, such as the Lombardia region in Italy, Madrid, Spain, and Île de France.

Following the same procedure used for the keyword "pneumonia", the researchers also produced a new dataset containing the keyword "dry cough", one of the other symptoms later associated with the COVID-19 syndrome. Even then, they observed the same pattern, namely an abnormal and statistically significant increase in the number of mentions of the word during the weeks leading up to the surge of infections in February 2020.