Making Sense of India's Covid Catastrophe Via Tweets: The Case of Mumbai

Over the past few weeks, the news media has been awash with stories of India's spiralling COVID crisis. It seems after a reported decline in COVID cases a few months ago, the second wave caught India unawares. The result: a sharp rise in COVID cases and fatalities combined with a steep shortage in the bare essentials such as oxygen, ventilator and medication, among other things. I am too grappling with a deeply traumatising and upsetting COVID situation and praying desperately for the recovery of that one person I love more than life itself. That one person for whom I could give my own life for, in a heartbeat. No questions asked.

So What Am I Doing?

In the light of this mounting crisis, I decided to make sense of this crisis using the one thing that lets me put things in perspective. Data. When I tried to obtain some data about outbreaks, places reporting shortages etc, I drew a blank. I strongly believe that it is this lack of data that is a relevant factor in combatting this deadly new wave and the catastrophe these shortages are posing.

First, I am not going to sit around and play the blame game. Or holler mindlessly on Twitter. But instead, I am going to try to use Twitter to make some sense of the situation. Who knows, I may even be able to help (PS: I am a small and humble person but I would like to try to help using the one skill that I have- DATA)

Now, Why Twitter?

Twitter has routinely been lambasted for a variety of reasons. It does seem to bring out the worst in many people. However given Twitter's centrality is letting people get their messages out in 128 characters or less, it's also a vital source of information (and a good way of seeking help). So I scraped the tweets coming out of Mumbai (from January 1 to May 4, 2021). I then 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. Here is my preliminary finding:

So based on the analysis of 30k English language coming out of Mumbai from Jan 1, 2021, onwards, mentions of COVID-crisis related terms such as oxygen, vaccine etc started rising in mid-April and peaked on April 27, 2021. It seems the COVID cases in the city too peaked around this time. From early May, there has been a decline in tweets with these keywords. Indeed as of May 8, 2021, it has been reported that the state of Maharashtra (whose capital is Mumbai) has seen a decline in COVID cases.

Now What?

No idea. It would be highly irresponsible to assume that these reports and tweets are any indications of the COVID crisis coming to an end. However, any decline gives small hope. We all can only hope the decline in cases can be sustained. So let us all stay strong.