Table 1 Base queries made against the Twitter API counts endpoint5 to obtain the total volume of tweets containing the above hashtags or keywords.

From: Evaluation of Twitter data for an emerging crisis: an application to the first wave of COVID-19 in the UK

Base twitter API query

#Covid OR #coronavirus OR covid OR coronavirus lang:en -is:retweet profile_country:GB

‘Face mask’ OR ‘face covering’ lang:en -is:retweet profile_country:GB

Cough OR #cough lang:en -is:retweet profile_country:GB

Fever OR #fever lang:en -is:retweet profile_country:GB

Symptom OR #symptom lang:en -is:retweet profile_country:GB

  1. Each query was made for the following UK locations: London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham & Leicester, whereby hashtags and keywords were both queried. Aggregated tweets were filtered to be of English language and retweets were negated. The time period queried was between February 1st - August 19th 2020, spanning the duration of the first major peak in case numbers in the UK.
Back to article page