Sensing Social Media to Forecast COVID-19 Cases

Social media has become a key tool for spreading the news, discussing ideas and comments on world events, playing a relevant role also in public health management, especially in epidemics surveillance like seasonal flu. Online social media actually can provide an important help in monitoring disease spreading as users self-report their health-related issues. Since the very first days of COVID-19 outbreak, people exchanged news, updates, sentiment and opinion about the pandemics. The paper describes a study aiming at evaluating the correlation of tweets with official COVID-19 data. Based on the outcomes of the correlation study, the paper proposes a forecasting model to predict the number of new daily COVID-19 cases. The approach is formulated as an autoregressive model that combines tweets and official COVID-19 data. A real-word dataset of tweets is used for the correlation study and to evaluate the performance of the forecasting model. Results shown the feasibility of the approach, highlighting the improvement obtained when tweets are integrated in the forecasting model, allowing to predict new COVID-19 cases in advance, on average 4-6 days before they were confirmed.