Based on WeChat data, China's most popular social media application, this research tells interesting things about the beginning days of the pandemic.
There are many bad guys in the story about sars-cov-2, which has knitted socks over the world, and the disease it causes, covid-19. USA? Yeah! who? Yeah! Chinese? of course!
The example I will talk about is one of China's dozens of bad faith proofs on this subject. Now sit back and listen to me carefully.
maybe there was someone who knew about the spinning wheel before anyone else, even before the chinese government and wuhan scientists. China's most popular social media app called WeChat.
Scientists named wenjun wang, yikai wang, xin zhang, yaing li, xiaoli jia, shuangsuo dang, each of whom had eaten a bull's heart, did not sit idle, they dared and researched in a country like China that a closed regime called "hot". The frequency and abundance of coronavirus-related keywords was surprising in the messaging made via WeChat, China's main social media site, and the searches made on the platform. Moreover, these messages and calls were weeks before the government of the People's Republic of China officially recognized the virus cases.
You can access the research here.
Researchers, who I never knew but whose research I always respect, suggest that social media keyword tracking strategy can be a useful tool in efforts to detect emerging infectious diseases. Based on this theory, the group led by wenjung wang researching wechat, look what they found;
In the whole of November 2019, the word feidian, the Chinese equivalent of the prevalence of the term sars, the term coronavirus, the type of virus to which sars-cov-2 belongs, the words shortness of breath (see: dyspnea) and diarrhea, during the months of November and December, the Chinese government's virus official It was searched and used in messages with an abnormal increase for exactly 44 days until the day he accepted it.
While none of us are aware of these cases as other world communities outside of China, the term novel coronavirus was frequently used on WeChat throughout December. Most of us knew sars, the old one of the coronavirus, simply by saying "sars", we were sober after February that it was also a coronavirus.
The term pneumonia also found a lot of space in both wechat and baidu, a Chinese search engine and social media platform, and was used more abnormally than it was used in normal times.
During this period, the frequency of use of keywords improved as follows;
"feidian" (chinese sars) at high frequency for 16 days.
sars trend word for 30 days.
novel coronavirus trend word for 20 days.
shortness of breath is the trend word for 9 days from the time when the numbers of people who started to experience pneumonia and shortness of breath at home, school, workplace started to increase.
dyspnea at the same frequency as the term shortness of breath.
diarrhea is the trend word for 12 days from the period when thousands of people started to have diarrhea as of December 18.
The coronavirus is a zoonotic disease, meaning it has jumped from animals to humans. For this reason, the Chinese government blamed being the source of the disease on the wuhan seafood market, which allegedly sells bats and pangolin animals. and even in order to help create a global perception, videos of the tomohon market in Indonesia, where wild animals are bought and sold, slaughtered and cooked, were circulated under the name of wuhan market video. There are many acceptable reasons for this argument, because the first recorded cases are mostly from the vicinity of Wuhan. But the timeline of the occurrence and spread of the disease is still very dark due to the Chinese closed regime. That's why the data presented by this wechat research is very valuable.
Another article published in the Lancet by Chinese researchers analyzed the first 41 clinical cases and concluded that the first patient presented to the hospital on December 1 with flu-like symptoms. Doctors were puzzled about this case because it was not clear which virus was causing the familiar symptoms. but the information given to us as the world is 10 -11 December.
South China Morning Post newspaper made a report on November 17 for the first case where all the findings pointed to this disease, but the Chinese government insisted on December 10-11.
In this context, wechat data, which is the subject of the research, should be considered. The wechat analysis is based on an open source publication index on the platform, and a search index from baidu, the primary search engine in China, is also used. These are a compilation of open source internet data that the Chinese government cannot change even if it sells the ditch atsa toto.
The data show that use of the words shortness of breath and dyspnea peaked on December 22. Diarrhea peaked on December 18. (Gastrointestinal issues are an early sign of coronavirus in some patients.)
“The sars word index was abnormally high in the first three days of December, especially when it peaked on December 1, 2019,” the report says.
meanwhile, usage of the word “feidian” started to rise on December 15th and remained at relatively high levels until December 29th.
“Of these keywords, feidian is particularly notable,” the report says. “In 2003, the sars epidemic caused mass panic among people in China, and about half of the victims were healthcare workers. Since then, Chinese doctors have been vigilant against sars and similar diseases. The researchers add that since Chinese doctors began seeing patients with viral pneumonia symptoms that suddenly began in November, it was natural for them to immediately think of sars disease first and mention feidian on WeChat during this time. In my opinion, it is quite reasonable for doctors who have had sars trauma to act sensitively when faced with suddenly increasing pneumonia cases and to communicate the issue with others on Wechat in a panic.
The frightening "censorship Chinese government" facts from the research of other countries' universities are also related to the results of the WeChat research.