When Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spread throughout the world, health authorities and governments in many countries – including the United States – decided to resort to lockdowns to stop its spread.
Visiting researcher Francesco Surano with his advisor, Prof. Alessandro Rizzo from Turin Polytechnic, collaborating with Prof. Maurizio Porfiri became interested in investigating the acceptance of such radical public health interventions.
Visiting researcher Francesco Surano with his advisor, Prof. Alessandro Rizzo from Turin Polytechnic, collaborating with Prof. Maurizio Porfiri became interested in investigating the acceptance of such radical public health interventions.
They conducted an analysis of 1.3 million Twitter messages that mentioned lockdown and were published from the U.S. between January and May 2020. They distinguished Tweets expressing positive and negative feelings about lockdown and demonstrated that the changes in perception during the course of the pandemic were mediated by spatial interactions and related to socio-ecomomic factors as well as political orientations.
The paper presenting these results, “Analysis of lockdown perception in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic” was just published in The European Physical Journal Special Topics, special issue on Complex Urban Systems.
Read the paper here.
Image credit: Francesco V. Surano, Maurizio Porfiri, and Alessandro Rizzo.