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      Sentiment Analysis of Nationwide Lockdown due to COVID 19 Outbreak: Evidence from India

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      a , b , a , *
      Asian Journal of Psychiatry
      Elsevier B.V.

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          Abstract

          Corona Virus Disease or COVID19 is a new virus disease that originated in Wuhan, China (Wang et al., 2020). The virus has now spread across the world and the almost all the countries are battling against this virus and are trying their best to curb the spread as much as possible. The World Health Organisation has declared it as a Pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020) and is leaving no stone unturned to control the pandemic and is awaiting a vaccine to cure it (El Zowalaty and Järhult, 2020). There are not many academic studies (barring a few e.g. Boldog et al., 2020; Goyal et al., 2020; Bhat et al., 2020) that can guide researchers to study the impact this pandemic has on the mental health of the people and also on the economies of countries worldwide. By the first week of March 2020, several countries like China, Italy, Spain, and Australia were fighting with the COVID19 pandemic by taking strict measures like nationwide lockdown or by cordoning off the areas that were suspected of having risks of community spread. Taking cues from the foreign counterparts, the government of India undertook an important decision of nationwide lockdown on March 25th for 21days from March 26th to April 14th, 2020 (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2020). India, with a population of 1.3 Billion people, was at a high risk of suffering from irreversible damage, and strict measures were expected to "flatten the curve." The Prime Minister of India announced the lockdown (COVID-19, 2020), but it did not come as a surprise because Indians were actually given a feel of what it had in store through a one-day curfew named as "Janata Curfew" of 14 hours on March 22nd from 7 AM to 9 PM (The Economic Times, 2020). Thus, Indians were exposed to a lockdown situation partially, and this helped in preparing mentally for the nationwide lockdown, and the announcement did not come as a shocker to them. Looking at the statistics of COVID19 infected, recovered, and death cases of Italy and other countries, Indians knew that drastic measures were needed in India to stop the numbers from rising exponentially. This paper deals with the sentiment analysis of Indians after the lockdown announcements were made. We used the social media platform Twitter for our analysis. Tweets were studied to gauge the feelings of Indians towards the lockdown. Tweets were extracted using the two prominent hashtags used namely: #IndiaLockdown and #IndiafightsCorona from March 25th to March 28th 2020. A total of 24000 tweets were considered for the analysis. Analysis was done using the software R and a wordcloud was generated that depicts the sentiments of the tweets. Even though there was negativity, fear, disgust, and sadness about the lockdown, the positive sentiments stood out. Fig. 1 shows that the prominent sentiment was positive. Indians were clear that they had to flatten the curve and were committed to it. The next sentiment that stood out was trust. Seemingly, the Indians trusted their government and were probably sure that government would implement the lockdown successfully and see that no citizens would struggle for basic essentials during the lockdown and the government would make arrangements for the same. Some tweets expressed total surprise about the decision but overall, it seemed like people were expecting such a measure as lockdown to contain the spread of the virus and this was possible only through social distancing and by practicing hygiene measures like washing hands frequently using soap or alcohol based sanitizer. Fig. 1 Wordcloud of the extracted tweets. Fig. 1 Fig. 2 , clearly shows the intensity of the various sentiments. There was sadness because people were worried what would the daily wage workers do to survive the lockdown period. Also, questions were raised about the unavailability of alcohol during the lockdown and there were concerns about alcohol addicts facing withdrawal symptoms. Fig. 2 Graphical representation of the sentiments. Fig. 2 Overall, it can be seen that Indians have taken the fight against COVID19 positively and majority are in agreement with the government for announcing the lockdown to flatten the curve. It could be seen from the tweets that several people were angry that the lockdown came a bit late. It should have been announced a week prior. Also, some tweets expressed concerns that the passengers from abroad who flew in should have been quarantined before letting them to reunite with their families. Nevertheless, as of now, the lockdown response seems positive and indicates that India has succeeded in controlling the corona virus spread to a great extent. Future studies can look in to pre and post lockdown tweets and understand whether there was a change in sentiments from the beginning to the end of the lockdown. Also, future studies can look in to factors that affect metal health during lockdowns and pandemic spreads. Another area for future research could be tackling of fake news that gets circulated through social media, impacting the mental health of the receivers. Funding Statement This research did not receive any funding from any agency. Contributors All the authors. Declaration of Competing Interest There is no conflict of interest among the authors.

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          Fear of COVID 2019: First suicidal case in India !

          The novel coronavirus 2019 currently designated as COVID 2019 is in the limelight since the beginning of New Year 2020 (Key considerations for repatriation and quarantine of travellers in relation to the outbreak of novel coronavirus, 2020, WHO, 2020). Though human coronaviruses have been recognised for many years but COVID 2019 was a new strain and its wide global spread sparkled panic among the common public (Human Coronavirus Types, 2020, CDC, 2020). Owing to the lack of immunity to this new strain of coronavirus, a large number of people at large are susceptible to it. Various alarming video clippings featuring COVID 2019 are in circulation on social media and being accessed by almost all individuals through their smartphones/ computers in developing countries (Coronavirus, 2020, Telegraph, 2020). In India, the first suicidal case by a 50 year old man was reported from a village in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh on 12th Feb 2020. He was a father-of-three who was informed by his doctor that he had contracted some viral illness which he wrongly correlated to COVID 2019 as he was constantly obsessed with the videos where Chinese victims were shown to collapse in public and suspected patients were forced into health care facilities for quarantine against their will. He was so disturbed that in order to protect his family, he quarantined himself and pelted stones on his family and friends when they tried to approach him. Later due to his fear and panic that he had acquired COVID 2019, he ended his life by hanging himself from a tree (Fearing he had contracted coronavirus, man locks family, kills himself, 2020, Hindustan Times, 2020). In an era of internet and technology, social media should have in-built algorithms which can automatically block video clippings from being uploaded at commonly accessed social networking sites which creates panic among the general public. Countries should have laws in place where forwarding of such sensational videos should be made punishable and such videos should be banned. Thus, social media should be a platform to disseminate the right education among the public so that everyone can enjoy the social media in a positive sense. During political turmoil in India, the Government puts a ban on internet services but strict and rapid action must be taken when unauthorized alarming videos are circulated related to public health issues (India’s Internet shutdown in Kashmir is the longest ever in a democracy, 2020, Washington Post, 2020). Financial disclosure None Contributors All authors contributed equally Previously published None. Declaration of Competing Interest None.
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            Phase-adjusted estimation of the number of Coronavirus Disease 2019 cases in Wuhan, China

            An outbreak of clusters of viral pneumonia due to a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2) happened in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China in December 2019. Since the outbreak, several groups reported estimated R 0 of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and generated valuable prediction for the early phase of this outbreak. After implementation of strict prevention and control measures in China, new estimation is needed. An infectious disease dynamics SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, and Removed) model was applied to estimate the epidemic trend in Wuhan, China under two assumptions of R t . In the first assumption, R t was assumed to maintain over 1. The estimated number of infections would continue to increase throughout February without any indication of dropping with R t  = 1.9, 2.6, or 3.1. The number of infections would reach 11,044, 70,258, and 227,989, respectively, by 29 February 2020. In the second assumption, R t was assumed to gradually decrease at different phases from high level of transmission (R t  = 3.1, 2.6, and 1.9) to below 1 (R t  = 0.9 or 0.5) owing to increasingly implemented public health intervention. Several phases were divided by the dates when various levels of prevention and control measures were taken in effect in Wuhan. The estimated number of infections would reach the peak in late February, which is 58,077–84,520 or 55,869–81,393. Whether or not the peak of the number of infections would occur in February 2020 may be an important index for evaluating the sufficiency of the current measures taken in China. Regardless of the occurrence of the peak, the currently strict measures in Wuhan should be continuously implemented and necessary strict public health measures should be applied in other locations in China with high number of COVID-19 cases, in order to reduce R t to an ideal level and control the infection.
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              Risk Assessment of Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 Outbreaks Outside China

              We developed a computational tool to assess the risks of novel coronavirus outbreaks outside of China. We estimate the dependence of the risk of a major outbreak in a country from imported cases on key parameters such as: (i) the evolution of the cumulative number of cases in mainland China outside the closed areas; (ii) the connectivity of the destination country with China, including baseline travel frequencies, the effect of travel restrictions, and the efficacy of entry screening at destination; and (iii) the efficacy of control measures in the destination country (expressed by the local reproduction number R loc ). We found that in countries with low connectivity to China but with relatively high R loc , the most beneficial control measure to reduce the risk of outbreaks is a further reduction in their importation number either by entry screening or travel restrictions. Countries with high connectivity but low R loc benefit the most from policies that further reduce R loc . Countries in the middle should consider a combination of such policies. Risk assessments were illustrated for selected groups of countries from America, Asia, and Europe. We investigated how their risks depend on those parameters, and how the risk is increasing in time as the number of cases in China is growing.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Asian J Psychiatr
                Asian J Psychiatr
                Asian Journal of Psychiatry
                Elsevier B.V.
                1876-2018
                1876-2026
                12 April 2020
                12 April 2020
                : 102089
                Affiliations
                [a ]Department of Humanities and Management, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, 576104, India
                [b ]Department of Information and Communication Technology, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, 576104, India
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author. giridhar.kamath@ 123456manipal.edu
                Article
                S1876-2018(20)30200-8 102089
                10.1016/j.ajp.2020.102089
                7152888
                32305035
                412d423b-0ed9-4937-a51f-1a0dc57258c6
                © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

                Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

                History
                : 5 April 2020
                : 6 April 2020
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