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. 2020 Aug 20;27(5):taaa120.
doi: 10.1093/jtm/taaa120.

Geolocated Twitter social media data to describe the geographic spread of SARS-CoV-2

Donal Bisanzio  1   2 , Moritz U G Kraemer  3   4   5 , Thomas Brewer  4 , John S Brownstein  3   4 , Richard Reithinger  1
Affiliations

Geolocated Twitter social media data to describe the geographic spread of SARS-CoV-2

Donal Bisanzio et al. J Travel Med. .

Abstract

Openly available, geotagged Twitter data from 2013 to 2015 was used to estimate the 2019–2020 human mobility patterns in and outside of China to predict the spatiotemporal spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Countries with the highest number of visiting Twitter users outside of China were the USA, Japan, UK, Germany and Turkey. A high correlation was observed when comparing country-level Twitter user visits and reported cases.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV2; Twitter; epidemiology; geospatial; mobility; pandemic.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Location visited by the study cohort of Twitter users who were followed up for 30 days after having tweeted at least two times on consecutive days from Wuhan between 1 December 2013 and 15 February 2014 and 1 December 2014 and 15 February 2015. North and Central America (A), Europe (B), Asia (C), South America (D), Africa and Middle East (E) and Oceania (F).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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