Public Health Messaging Effectiveness During Pandemics

Project Description

The pandemic revealed the public health system had a flaw - the effectiveness of the public health messaging system. The current system was unable to produce timely, consistent, and cohesive messaging. The messaging system only operated on a national or state level approach. It is unable to be tailored to the needs of local communities, so frontline public health officials did not know how to approach the complexities of the individuals of their communities.

Project Overview

For this project, we focused on this current phase of the pandemic. One can describe this phase as a ‘gray area’, since the messaging about the pandemic is not as frequent as before even though the pandemic is still occurring. We examined the level of engagement of tweets by Public Health Experts. We also examined how the different approaches that different Public Health Experts have from the start of the pandemic compared to now.

Data Set and Methodologies

In order to address this issue, we created a dataset to analyze the tweets that are related to the Covid-19 pandemic on twitter. We used Twitter API and scripts to create a collection of tweets from Public Health Experts (PHE) and Friends of the PHE. We performed statistical analysis on public metrics such as likes, retweets, and replies. And performed a limited analysis to see how connected the PHE are with each other.

Challenges

The main challenge that we faced was with data extraction on the Twitter API. The issue was specifically with getting the tweet counts/reshare/response for covid related keywords. We experienced challenges with the data we collected, initially, we wanted a more longitudinal study.

Built With

• jupyter
• python
• twitter