India's COVID Catastrophe In Tweets: Mumbai vs New Delhi

Modern-day India has lent itself to many an adjective, both good and bad. It certainly is an outlier in many ways. Of the many things that India is, it is often overlooked that India is also the land of tales. Perhaps, India itself is a tale, well a riddle in the very least. Now one of the many tales that define India is India's own Tale of Two Cities.

The Tale of Two Cities

Like so many other countries in the world (including Australia and the US), one major city acts as the political capital, another city acts as a financial and cultural centre. In India, while New Delhi is the political capital, Mumbai is the financial capital. Since the past couple of weeks, India has been engulfed by a catastrophic COVID crisis. This deadly wave is purported to have started in early March, after several months of declining COVID cases. The COVID crisis has been worsened by a lack of the bare essentials needed to combat the pandemic. Essentials such as vaccines, oxygen and plasma are in dire shortage. The lack of chronic data is impeding India's COVID response. So I decided to examine Twitter data to get a sense of how the COVID crisis has been playing out in Mumbai and New Delhi

Twitter Joins the Tale of Two Cities

I extracted about 30k tweets from Mumbai and New Delhi which centred on COVID related topics. I analysed them for keywords used in the context of this deadly new crisis- ‘covid’, ‘plasma’, ‘oxygen’, ‘vaccine’ with the view of seeing if there is any patterns or insight to be gained. From January 1 to early April, these terms did not appear on the anvil of Mumbai twitter. However, there was a sharp increase in the frequency of these terms on April 27, 2021.

I do not know what is so special about this date but there was a palpable decline in the mention of these terms in early May. As of May 12, 2021, COVID cases have said to be in a decline in Mumbai. However, the story is rather different in New Delhi, the political capital

Some of these search terms especially vaccine had been on Delhi Twitter's radar since early January. The mention of oxygen started increasing from April 16 onwards and peaked on April 30. The mention of plasma too has been increasing and displayed a peak on April 30, 2021. Based on first-hand accounts, I can confirm these two essentials rather scarce in New Delhi.

While we cannot use these tweets as a basis for assessing the progress of this fight against COVID, some of these Twitter trends do map onto the news being reported on the ground. Hence I will continue to explore other ways of leveraging Twitter for supporting disaster response.