Abstract:

The major disruption of the daily lives of billions of people due to the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly caused anguish in the lives of many people. Besides the general health effects of the disease, mental health issues caused by the fear of catching the disease or by mitigation measures such as social distancing, closing schools, and ultimately complete lockdown of some cities should be taken into account as a serious effect of the pandemic. We use the extremely popular microblogging platform Twitter to analyze the overall sentiment (positive, neutral, and negative) that the general population has in a certain area. As the pandemic progresses, we expect that the behavior of people expressing negative sentiments on Twitter to rise due to the increase in time spent at home, in isolation.