TY  - JOUR
ID  - uninimx3483
TI  - Analyzing preventive precautions to limit spread of COVID-19
AV  - public
JF  - PLOS ONE
IS  - 8
A1  - Qamar, Usman
A1  - Ahmad, Ayaz
A1  - Rustam, Furqan
A1  - Saad, Eysha
A1  - Siddique, Muhammad Abubakar
A1  - Lee, Ernesto
A1  - Ortega-Mansilla, Arturo
A1  - Díez, Isabel de la Torre
A1  - Ashraf, Imran
N2  - With the global spread of COVID-19, the governments advised the public for adopting safety precautions to limit its spread. The virus spreads from people, contaminated places, and nozzle droplets that necessitate strict precautionary measures. Consequently, different safety precautions have been implemented to fight COVID-19 such as wearing a facemask, restriction of social gatherings, keeping 6 feet distance, etc. Despite the warnings, highlighted need for such measures, and the increasing severity of the pandemic situation, the expected number of people adopting these precautions is low. This study aims at assessing and understanding the public perception of COVID-19 safety precautions, especially the use of facemask. A unified framework of sentiment lexicon with the proposed ensemble EB-DT is devised to analyze sentiments regarding safety precautions. Extensive experiments are performed with a large dataset collected from Twitter. In addition, the factors leading to a negative perception of safety precautions are analyzed by performing topic analysis using the Latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm. The experimental results reveal that 12% of the tweets correspond to negative sentiments towards facemask precaution mainly by its discomfort. Analysis of change in peoples? sentiment over time indicates a gradual increase in the positive sentiments regarding COVID-19 restrictions.
SN  - 1932-6203
Y1  - 2022/08//
VL  - 17
UR  - http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272350
ER  -