Identification of Risk Factors and Symptoms of COVID-19: Analysis of Biomedical Literature and Social Media Data

In December 2019, the COVID-19 outbreak started in China and rapidly spread around the world. Lack of a vaccine or optimized intervention raised the importance of characterizing risk factors and symptoms for the early identification and successful treatment of patients with COVID-19.

This study aims to investigate and analyze biomedical literature and public social media data to understand the association of risk factors and symptoms with the various outcomes observed in patients with COVID-19.

Through semantic analysis, we collected 45 retrospective cohort studies, which evaluated 303 clinical and demographic variables across 13 different outcomes of patients with COVID-19, and 84,140 Twitter posts from 1036 COVID-19-positive users. Machine learning tools to extract biomedical information were introduced to identify mentions of uncommon or novel symptoms in tweets. We then examined and compared two data sets to expand our landscape of risk factors and symptoms related to COVID-19.

From the biomedical literature, approximately 90% of clinical and demographic variables showed inconsistent associations with COVID-19 outcomes. Consensus analysis identified 72 risk factors that were specifically associated with individual outcomes. From the social media data, 51 symptoms were characterized and analyzed. By comparing social media data with biomedical literature, we identified 25 novel symptoms that were specifically mentioned in tweets but have been not previously well characterized. Furthermore, there were certain combinations of symptoms that were frequently mentioned together in social media.

Identified outcome-specific risk factors, symptoms, and combinations of symptoms may serve as surrogate indicators to identify patients with COVID-19 and predict their clinical outcomes in order to provide appropriate treatments.