Monitoring the Emotional Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study in Mexico

To this end, we analyzed 760,064,879 public domain tweets collected from a public access repository to examine the collective shifts in the general mood about the pandemic evolution, news cycles, and governmental policies using open sentiment analysis tools. Sentiment analysis polarity scores, which oscillate around -0.15, show a weekly seasonality according to Twitter's usage and a consistently negative outlook from the population.

It also remarks on the increased controversy after the governmental decision to terminate the lockdown and the celebrated holidays, which encouraged the people to incur social gatherings. These findings expose the adverse emotional effects of the ongoing pandemic while showing an increase in social media usage rates of 2.38 times, which users employ as a coping mechanism to mitigate the feelings of isolation related to long-term social distancing.

The findings have important implications in the mental health infrastructure for ongoing mitigation efforts and feedback on the perception of policies and other measures. The overall trend of the sentiment polarity is 0.0001110643