Title
Hope Amid a Pandemic: Is Psychological Distress Alleviating in South America While Coronavirus Is Still on Surge?
Date Issued
01 January 2021
Access level
open access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Mahmood K.
Oblitas-Cruz J.
Ahmed T.
University of São Paulo
Publisher(s)
Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Abstract
As of November 17, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has over 55 million reported cases, causing more than 1.3 million deaths. To prevent this pandemic, some countries placed severe resection in the form of full-scale lockdown, while others took a moderate approach, e.g., mass testing, prohibiting large-scale public gatherings, restricting travels. South America adopted primarily the lockdown strategies for not having a sophisticated public-health infrastructure. Since the social interactions between people are primarily affected by the lockdown; psychological distress, e.g., anxiety, stress, fear are supposedly affecting the South American population in a severe way. This paper aims to explore the impact of lockdown over the psychological aspect of the people of all the Spanish speaking South American capitals. We have utilized infodemiology approach by employing large-scale Twitter data-set over 33 million feeds in order to understand people’s interaction over the months of this on-going coronavirus pandemic. Our result is surprising: at the beginning of the pandemic, people demonstrated strong emotions (i.e. anxiety, worry, fear) that declined over time even though the actual pandemic is worsening by having more positive cases, and inflicting more deaths. Therefore, the result demonstrate that the South American population is adapting to this pandemic thus improving the overall psychological distress.
Start page
274
End page
283
Volume
1366 AISC
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Sistema respiratorio Psicología (incluye terapias de aprendizaje, habla, visual y otras discapacidades físicas y mentales) Virología
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85107368864
ISBN
9783030726508
ISSN of the container
21945357
ISBN of the container
978-303072650-8
Conference
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing - World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies, WorldCIST 2021
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus