Social Disparities in Oral Health in America amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

09/16/2021
by   Yangxin Fan, et al.
1

We conduct a large-scale social media-based study of oral health during the COVID-19 pandemic based on tweets from 9,104 Twitter users across 26 states (with sufficient samples) in the United States for the period between November 12, 2020 and June 14, 2021. To better understand how discussions on different topics/oral diseases vary across the users, we acquire or infer demographic information of users and other characteristics based on retrieved information from user profiles. Women and younger adults (19-29) are more likely to talk about oral health problems. We use the LDA topic model to extract the major topics/oral diseases in tweets. Overall, 26.70 wisdom tooth pain/jaw hurt, 23.86 discuss chipped tooth/tooth break, 16.23 are about tooth decay/gum bleeding. By conducting logistic regression, we find that discussions vary across user characteristics. More importantly, we find social disparities in oral health during the pandemic. Specifically, we find that health insurance coverage rate is the most significant predictor in logistic regression for topic prediction. People from counties with higher insurance coverage tend to tweet less about all topics of oral diseases. People from counties at a higher risk of COVID-19 talk more about tooth decay/gum bleeding and chipped tooth/tooth break. Older adults (50+), who are vulnerable to COVID-19, are more likely to discuss dental pain. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale social media-based study to analyze and understand oral health in America amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope the findings of our study through the lens of social media can provide insights for oral health practitioners and policy makers.

READ FULL TEXT

page 4

page 6

research
07/05/2020

Detecting Topic and Sentiment Dynamics Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Using Social Media

The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) has greatly inf...
research
10/15/2020

Understanding the Hoarding Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic using Large Scale Social Media Data

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's lives around the world at a ...
research
05/18/2020

Critical Impact of Social Networks Infodemic on Defeating Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: Twitter-Based Study and Research Directions

News creation and consumption has been changing since the advent of soci...
research
04/21/2020

The Ivory Tower Lost: How College Students Respond Differently than the General Public to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Recently, the pandemic of the novel Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) ...
research
07/01/2020

Monitoring Depression Trend on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected people's daily lives and cau...
research
09/08/2020

Covid-Transformer: Detecting COVID-19 Trending Topics on Twitter Using Universal Sentence Encoder

The novel corona-virus disease (also known as COVID-19) has led to a pan...
research
03/11/2021

Characterizing Partisan Political Narratives about COVID-19 on Twitter

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has been testing every soc...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset