Vaping and COVID-19: Insights for Public Health and Clinical Care from Twitter

Anuja Majmundar, Jon-Patrick Allem, Jennifer B. Unger and Tess Boley Cruz
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Anuja Majmundar: Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA
Jon-Patrick Allem: Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA
Jennifer B. Unger: Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA
Tess Boley Cruz: Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 21, 1-8

Abstract: This study describes key topics of discussions on Twitter at the intersection of vaping and COVID-19 and documents public reactions to announcements from authoritative health agencies. Twitter posts containing vaping and COVID-19-related terms were collected from 1 December 2019 to 3 May 2020 ( n = 23,103 posts). Text classifiers and unsupervised machine learning were used to identify topics in posts. Predominant topics included COVID-19 Respiratory Health (18.87%), COVID-19 Susceptibility (17.53%), Death (10.07%), Other COVID-19 Health Effects (9.62%), and Severity of COVID-19 (7.72%), among others. Public conversations on topics, such as Severity of COVID-19 , Transmission , Susceptibility , Health Effects , Death , and Smoking cessation , were shaped by announcements from U.S. and international health agencies. Armed with the insights from this study, medical providers should be prepared to discuss vaping-related health risks with their patients in the era of COVID-19. Misconceptions around vaping as a protective behavior from, and an effective treatment against, COVID-19 should also be corrected.

Keywords: vaping; COVID-19; Twitter; temporal trends; health education; public health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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