COVID-19 Social Sentiment
We have been actively collecting daily tweets since 09 March 2020. Using Twitter's application programming interface (API), specific keywords associated with covid (it is worth noting that 18 different variations were used) are used to extract English tweets in South Africa. Since the tweets extracted are in the form of unique IDs, to get the text of the tweets, a python package called Twarc is used to hydrate the tweets unique IDs. Furthermore, the collected tweets are divided into nine South African provinces. The weekly time-series animations below are used to visualize the number of times the word "covid" appears in tweets. One of the variables influencing the usage of the word "covid" in tweets is the number of weekly covid cases. Hence, we also include the weekly cases in the time series.