Note: The cumulative case count for some counties (with small population) is higher than expected due to the inclusion of non-permanent residents in COVID-19 case counts.

Reporting of Aggregate Case and Death Count data was discontinued on May 11, 2023, with the expiration of the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration. Although these data will continue to be publicly available, this dataset will no longer be updated.

Aggregate Data Collection Process Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, data were reported through a robust process with the following steps:

• Aggregate county-level counts were obtained indirectly, via automated overnight web collection, or directly, via a data submission process.
• If more than one official county data source existed, CDC used a comprehensive data selection process comparing each official county data source to retrieve the highest case and death counts, unless otherwise specified by the state.
• A CDC data team reviewed counts for congruency prior to integration. CDC routinely compiled these data and post the finalized information on COVID Data Tracker.
• Cases and deaths are based on date of report and not on the date of symptom onset. CDC calculates rates in this data by using population estimates provided by the US Census Bureau Population Estimates Program (2019 Vintage).
• COVID-19 aggregate case and death data were organized in a time series that includes cumulative number of cases and deaths as reported by a jurisdiction on a given date. New case and death counts were calculated as the week-to-week change in reported cumulative cases and deaths (i.e., newly reported cases and deaths = cumulative number of cases/deaths reported this week minus the cumulative total reported the week before.

This process was collaborative, with CDC and jurisdictions working together to ensure the accuracy of COVID-19 case and death numbers. County counts provided the most up-to-date numbers on cases and deaths by report date. Throughout data collection, CDC retrospectively updated counts to correct known data quality issues. CDC also worked with jurisdictions after the end of the public health emergency declaration to finalize county data.

• Source: The weekly archived dataset is based on county-level aggregate count data
• Confirmed/Probable Cases/Death breakdown: Cumulative cases and deaths for each county are included. Total reported cases include probable and confirmed cases.
• Time Series Frequency: The weekly archived dataset contains weekly time series data (i.e., one record per week per county)

Important note: The counts reflected during a given time period in this dataset may not match the counts reflected for the same time period in the daily archived dataset noted above. Discrepancies may exist due to differences between county and state COVID-19 case surveillance and reconciliation efforts.

The surveillance case definition for COVID-19, a nationally notifiable disease, was first described in a position statement from the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, which was later revised. However, there is some variation in how jurisdictions implement these case classifications. More information on how CDC collects COVID-19 case surveillance data can be found at FAQ: COVID-19 Data and Surveillance.

Confirmed and Probable Counts In this dataset, counts by jurisdiction are not displayed by confirmed or probable status. Instead, counts of confirmed and probable cases and deaths are included in the Total Cases and Total Deaths columns, when available. Not all jurisdictions report

It is increasingly recognized that policies have played a role in both alleviating and exacerbating the health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet there has been limited work to systematically evaluate the substantial variation in local COVID-19-related policies in the U.S. The objective of the U.S. COVID-19 County Policy (UCCP) Database is to systematically gather, characterize, and assess variation in U.S. county-level COVID-19-related policies. The current data upload represents the first wave of data collection, which includes data on over 20 policies gathered across 171 counties in 7 states during January-March 2021. These include county-level COVID-19-related policies within 3 policy domains that are likely to affect a variety of health outcomes: (1) containment/closure, (2) economic support, and (3) public health. In ongoing work, we are conducting retrospective longitudinal weekly data collection for the period 2020-2021 from a larger swath of 300+ U.S. counties in all 50 states and Washington D.C., and the current database will be updated with new data as it becomes available.

Introduction

There are several works based on Natural Language Processing on newspaper reports. Mining opinions from headlines [ 1 ] using Standford NLP and SVM by Rameshbhaiet. Al.compared several algorithms on a small and large dataset. Rubinet. al., in their paper [ 2 ], created a mechanism to differentiate fake news from real ones by building a set of characteristics of news according to their types. The purpose was to contribute to the low resource data available for training machine learning algorithms. Doumitet. al.in [ 3 ] have implemented LDA, a topic modeling approach to study bias present in online news media.

However, there are not many NLP research invested in studying COVID-19. Most applications include classification of chest X-rays and CT-scans to detect presence of pneumonia in lungs [ 4 ], a consequence of the virus. Other research areas include studying the genome sequence of the virus[ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ] and replicating its structure to fight and find a vaccine. This research is crucial in battling the pandemic. The few NLP based research publications are sentiment classification of online tweets by Samuel et el [ 8 ] to understand fear persisting in people due to the virus. Similar work has been done using the LSTM network to classify sentiments from online discussion forums by Jelodaret. al.[ 9 ]. NKK dataset is the first study on a comparatively larger dataset of a newspaper report on COVID-19, which contributed to the virus’s awareness to the best of our knowledge.

2 Data-set Introduction

2.1 Data Collection

We accumulated 1000 online newspaper report from United States of America (USA) on COVID-19. The newspaper includes The Washington Post (USA) and StarTribune (USA). We have named it as “Covid-News-USA-NNK”. We also accumulated 50 online newspaper report from Bangladesh on the issue and named it “Covid-News-BD-NNK”. The newspaper includes The Daily Star (BD) and Prothom Alo (BD). All these newspapers are from the top provider and top read in the respective countries. The collection was done manually by 10 human data-collectors of age group 23- with university degrees. This approach was suitable compared to automation to ensure the news were highly relevant to the subject. The newspaper online sites had dynamic content with advertisements in no particular order. Therefore there were high chances of online scrappers to collect inaccurate news reports. One of the challenges while collecting the data is the requirement of subscription. Each newspaper required $1 per subscriptions. Some criteria in collecting the news reports provided as guideline to the human data-collectors were as follows:

The headline must have one or more words directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.

The content of each news must have 5 or more keywords directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.

The genre of the news can be anything as long as it is relevant to the topic. Political, social, economical genres are to be more prioritized.

Avoid taking duplicate reports.

Maintain a time frame for the above mentioned newspapers.

To collect these data we used a google form for USA and BD. We have two human editor to go through each entry to check any spam or troll entry.

2.2 Data Pre-processing and Statistics

Some pre-processing steps performed on the newspaper report dataset are as follows:

Remove hyperlinks.

Remove non-English alphanumeric characters.

Remove stop words.

Lemmatize text.

While more pre-processing could have been applied, we tried to keep the data as much unchanged as possible since changing sentence structures could result us in valuable information loss. While this was done with help of a script, we also assigned same human collectors to cross check for any presence of the above mentioned criteria.

The primary data statistics of the two dataset are shown in Table 1 and 2.

Table 1: Covid-News-USA-NNK data statistics

No of words per headline

7 to 20

No of words per body content

150 to 2100

Table 2: Covid-News-BD-NNK data statistics No of words per headline

10 to 20

No of words per body content

100 to 1500

2.3 Dataset Repository

We used GitHub as our primary data repository in account name NKK^1. Here, we created two repositories USA-NKK^2 and BD-NNK^3. The dataset is available in both CSV and JSON format. We are regularly updating the CSV files and regenerating JSON using a py script. We provided a python script file for essential operation. We welcome all outside collaboration to enrich the dataset.

3 Literature Review

Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with text (also known as categorical) data in computer science, utilizing numerous diverse methods like one-hot encoding, word embedding, etc., that transform text to machine language, which can be fed to multiple machine learning and deep learning algorithms.

Some well-known applications of NLP includes fraud detection on online media sites[ 10 ], using authorship attribution in fallback authentication systems[ 11 ], intelligent conversational agents or chatbots[ 12 ] and machine translations used by Google Translate[ 13 ]. While these are all downstream tasks, several exciting developments have been made in the algorithm solely for Natural Language Processing tasks. The two most trending ones are BERT[ 14 ], which uses bidirectional encoder-decoder architecture to create the transformer model, that can do near-perfect classification tasks and next-word predictions for next generations, and GPT-3 models released by OpenAI[ 15 ] that can generate texts almost human-like. However, these are all pre-trained models since they carry huge computation cost. Information Extraction is a generalized concept of retrieving information from a dataset. Information extraction from an image could be retrieving vital feature spaces or targeted portions of an image; information extraction from speech could be retrieving information about names, places, etc[ 16 ]. Information extraction in texts could be identifying named entities and locations or essential data. Topic modeling is a sub-task of NLP and also a process of information extraction. It clusters words and phrases of the same context together into groups. Topic modeling is an unsupervised learning method that gives us a brief idea about a set of text. One commonly used topic modeling is Latent Dirichlet Allocation or LDA[17].

Keyword extraction is a process of information extraction and sub-task of NLP to extract essential words and phrases from a text. TextRank [ 18 ] is an efficient keyword extraction technique that uses graphs to calculate the weight of each word and pick the words with more weight to it.

Word clouds are a great visualization technique to understand the overall ’talk of the topic’. The clustered words give us a quick understanding of the content.

4 Our experiments and Result analysis

We used the wordcloud library^4 to create the word clouds. Figure 1 and 3 presents the word cloud of Covid-News-USA- NNK dataset by month from February to May. From the figures 1,2,3, we can point few information:

In February, both the news paper have talked about China and source of the outbreak.

StarTribune emphasized on Minnesota as the most concerned state. In April, it seemed to have been concerned more.

Both the newspaper talked about the virus impacting the economy, i.e, bank, elections, administrations, markets.

Washington Post discussed global issues more than StarTribune.

StarTribune in February mentioned the first precautionary measurement: wearing masks, and the uncontrollable spread of the virus throughout the nation.

While both the newspaper mentioned the outbreak in China in February, the weight of the spread in the United States are more highlighted through out March till May, displaying the critical impact caused by the virus.

We used a script to extract all numbers related to certain keywords like ’Deaths’, ’Infected’, ’Died’ , ’Infections’, ’Quarantined’, Lock-down’, ’Diagnosed’ etc from the news reports and created a number of cases for both the newspaper. Figure 4 shows the statistics of this series. From this extraction technique, we can observe that April was the peak month for the covid cases as it gradually rose from February. Both the newspaper clearly shows us that the rise in covid cases from February to March was slower than the rise from March to April. This is an important indicator of possible recklessness in preparations to battle the virus. However, the steep fall from April to May also shows the positive response against the attack. We used Vader Sentiment Analysis to extract sentiment of the headlines and the body. On average, the sentiments were from -0.5 to -0.9. Vader Sentiment scale ranges from -1(highly negative to 1(highly positive). There were some cases

where the sentiment scores of the headline and body contradicted each other,i.e., the sentiment of the headline was negative but the sentiment of the body was slightly positive. Overall, sentiment analysis can assist us sort the most concerning (most negative) news from the positive ones, from which we can learn more about the indicators related to COVID-19 and the serious impact caused by it. Moreover, sentiment analysis can also provide us information about how a state or country is reacting to the pandemic. We used PageRank algorithm to extract keywords from headlines as well as the body content. PageRank efficiently highlights important relevant keywords in the text. Some frequently occurring important keywords extracted from both the datasets are: ’China’, Government’, ’Masks’, ’Economy’, ’Crisis’, ’Theft’ , ’Stock market’ , ’Jobs’ , ’Election’, ’Missteps’, ’Health’, ’Response’. Keywords extraction acts as a filter allowing quick searches for indicators in case of locating situations of the economy,

Context

This dataset is a product of a GitHub repository. Sources and methodology can be seen there step by step. Inconsistent values(negative increase etc.) are also explained there.

Acknowledgements

Most of the data in this dataset is taken from "COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University", here is the link for the repo.

Covid-19 data of France are taken from "Ministère des Solidarités et de la Santé" (Ministry of Health in France).

Population data are taken from United Nations. Here is the link for it.

Inspiration

I've needed to create a Covid-19 dataset for my Design Project at my university. Here is the dashboard as one of its products(out of date). For many reasons, I've faced a lot of problems during the processes. After I've finished it; I've decided to put the data collection part to Python, to create something that I can easily update and show the solutions of the problems that challenged me the most. The resulting dataset can be useful here.

COVID-19 Cases information is reported through the Pennsylvania State Department’s National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (PA-NEDSS). As new cases are passed to the Allegheny County Health Department they are investigated by case investigators. During investigation some cases which are initially determined by the State to be in the Allegheny County jurisdiction may change, which can account for differences between publication of the files on the number of cases, deaths and tests. Additionally, information is not always reported to the State in a timely manner, delays can range from days to weeks, which can also account for discrepancies between previous and current files. Test and Case information will be updated daily. This resource contains individuals who received a COVID-19 test and individuals whom are probable cases. Every day, these records are overwritten with updates. Each row in the data reflects a person that is tested, not tests that are conducted. People that are tested more than once will have their testing and case data updated using the following rules:

1. Positive tests overwrite negative tests.
2. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests overwrite antibody or antigen (AG) tests.
3. The first positive PCR test is never overwritten. Data collected from additional tests do not replace the first positive PCR test.

Note: On April 4th 2022 the Pennsylvania Department of Health no longer required labs to report negative AG tests. Therefore aggregated counts that included AG tests have been removed from the Municipality/Neighborhood files going forward. Versions of this data up to this cut-off have been retained as archived files.

Individual Test information is also updated daily. This resource contains the details and results of individual tests along with demographic information of the individual tested. Only PCR and AG tests are included. Every day, these records are overwritten with updates. This resource should be used to determine positivity rates.

The remaining datasets provide statistics on death demographics. Demographic, municipality and neighborhood information for deaths are reported on a weekly schedule and are not included with individual cases or tests. This has been done to protect the privacy and security of individuals and their families in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Municipality or City of Pittsburgh Neighborhood is based off the geocoded home address of the individual tested.

Individuals whose home address is incomplete may not be in Allegheny County but whose temporary residency, work or other mitigating circumstance are determined to be in Allegheny County by the Pennsylvania Department of Health are counted as "Undefined".

Since the start of the pandemic, the ACHD has mapped every day’s COVID tests, cases, and deaths to their Allegheny County municipality and neighborhood. Tests were mapped to patient address, and if this was not available, to the provider location. This has recently resulted in apparent testing rates that exceeded the populations of various municipalities -- mostly those with healthcare providers. As this was brought to our attention, the health department and our data partners began researching and comparing methods to most accurately display the data. This has led us to leave those with missing home addresses off the map. Although these data will still appear in test, case and death counts, there will be over 20,000 fewer tests and almost 1000 fewer cases on the map. In addition to these map changes, we have identified specific health systems and laboratories that had data uploading errors that resulted in missing locations, and are working with them to correct these errors.

Due to minor discrepancies in the Municipal boundary and the City of Pittsburgh Neighborhood files individuals whose City Neighborhood cannot be identified are be counted as “Undefined (Pittsburgh)”.

On May 19, 2023, with the rescinding of the COVID-19 public health emergency, changes in data and reporting mechanisms prompted a change to an annual data sharing schedule for tests, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Dates for annual release are TBD. The weekly municipal counts and individual data produced before this changed are maintained as archive files.

Support for Health Equity datasets and tools provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) through their Health Equity Initiative.

Dataset of publicly available images from COVID-19 positive patients collected from several sources over the net. All images are chest x-rays from frontal view (AP or PA). There is a ZIP file containing 900 images and a metadata in CSV format which includes information about 452 images.Note that some of the images are from pediatrics and/or from early-stage patients with no specific image findings noted by the radiologist; but all of them are from COVID-positive cases. Related guideline and details are available in the GitHub repo.

Note: After May 3, 2024, this dataset will no longer be updated because hospitals are no longer required to report data on COVID-19 hospital admissions, hospital capacity, or occupancy data to HHS through CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). The related CDC COVID Data Tracker site was revised or retired on May 10, 2023.

This dataset represents weekly COVID-19 hospitalization data and metrics aggregated to national, state/territory, and regional levels. COVID-19 hospitalization data are reported to CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, which monitors national and local trends in healthcare system stress, capacity, and community disease levels for approximately 6,000 hospitals in the United States. Data reported by hospitals to NHSN and included in this dataset represent aggregated counts and include metrics capturing information specific to COVID-19 hospital admissions, and inpatient and ICU bed capacity occupancy.

Reporting information:

• As of December 15, 2022, COVID-19 hospital data are required to be reported to NHSN, which monitors national and local trends in healthcare system stress, capacity, and community disease levels for approximately 6,000 hospitals in the United States. Data reported by hospitals to NHSN represent aggregated counts and include metrics capturing information specific to hospital capacity, occupancy, hospitalizations, and admissions. Prior to December 15, 2022, hospitals reported data directly to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or via a state submission for collection in the HHS Unified Hospital Data Surveillance System (UHDSS).
• While CDC reviews these data for errors and corrects those found, some reporting errors might still exist within the data. To minimize errors and inconsistencies in data reported, CDC removes outliers before calculating the metrics. CDC and partners work with reporters to correct these errors and update the data in subsequent weeks.
• Many hospital subtypes, including acute care and critical access hospitals, as well as Veterans Administration, Defense Health Agency, and Indian Health Service hospitals, are included in the metric calculations provided in this report. Psychiatric, rehabilitation, and religious non-medical hospital types are excluded from calculations.
• Data are aggregated and displayed for hospitals with the same Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Certification Number (CCN), which are assigned by CMS to counties based on the CMS Provider of Services files.
• Full details on COVID-19 hospital data reporting guidance can be found here: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/covid-19-faqs-hospitals-hospital-laboratory-acute-care-facility-data-reporting.pdf

Metric details:

• Time Period: timeseries data will update weekly on Mondays as soon as they are reviewed and verified, usually before 8 pm ET. Updates will occur the following day when reporting coincides with a federal holiday. Note: Weekly updates might be delayed due to delays in reporting. All data are provisional. Because these provisional counts are subject to change, including updates to data reported previously, adjustments can occur. Data may be updated since original publication due to delays in reporting (to account for data received after a given Thursday publication) or data quality corrections.
• New COVID-19 Hospital Admissions (count): Number of new admissions of patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in the previous week (including both adult and pediatric admissions) in the entire jurisdiction.
• New COVID-19 Hospital Admissions (7-Day Average): 7-day average of new admissions of patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in the previous week (including both adult and pediatric admissions) in the entire jurisdiction.
• Cumulative COVID-19 Hospital Admissions: Cumulative total number of admissions of patients with labo

The Response2covid19 dataset tracks governments’ responses to COVID-19 all around the world. The dataset is at the country-level and covers the January-October 2020 period; it is updated on a monthly basis. It tracks 20 measures – 13 public health measures and 7 economic measures – taken by 228 governments. The tracking of the measures allows creating an index of the rigidity of public health measures and an index of economic response to the pandemic. The objective of the dataset is both to inform citizens and to help researchers and governments in fighting the pandemic.The dataset can be downloaded and used freely. Please properly cite the name of the dataset (“Governments’ Responses to COVID-19 (Response2covid19)”) and the reference: Porcher, Simon "A novel dataset of governments' responses to COVID-19 all around the world", Chaire EPPP 2020-03 discussion paper, 2020.

Note: DPH is updating and streamlining the COVID-19 cases, deaths, and testing data. As of 6/27/2022, the data will be published in four tables instead of twelve.

The COVID-19 Cases, Deaths, and Tests by Day dataset contains cases and test data by date of sample submission. The death data are by date of death. This dataset is updated daily and contains information back to the beginning of the pandemic. The data can be found at https://data.ct.gov/Health-and-Human-Services/COVID-19-Cases-Deaths-and-Tests-by-Day/g9vi-2ahj.

The COVID-19 State Metrics dataset contains over 93 columns of data. This dataset is updated daily and currently contains information starting June 21, 2022 to the present. The data can be found at https://data.ct.gov/Health-and-Human-Services/COVID-19-State-Level-Data/qmgw-5kp6 .

The COVID-19 County Metrics dataset contains 25 columns of data. This dataset is updated daily and currently contains information starting June 16, 2022 to the present. The data can be found at https://data.ct.gov/Health-and-Human-Services/COVID-19-County-Level-Data/ujiq-dy22 .

The COVID-19 Town Metrics dataset contains 16 columns of data. This dataset is updated daily and currently contains information starting June 16, 2022 to the present. The data can be found at https://data.ct.gov/Health-and-Human-Services/COVID-19-Town-Level-Data/icxw-cada . To protect confidentiality, if a town has fewer than 5 cases or positive NAAT tests over the past 7 days, those data will be suppressed.

Count of COVID-19-associated deaths by date of death. Deaths reported to either the OCME or DPH are included in the COVID-19 data. COVID-19-associated deaths include persons who tested positive for COVID-19 around the time of death and persons who were not tested for COVID-19 whose death certificate lists COVID-19 disease as a cause of death or a significant condition contributing to death.

Data on Connecticut deaths were obtained from the Connecticut Deaths Registry maintained by the DPH Office of Vital Records. Cause of death was determined by a death certifier (e.g., physician, APRN, medical examiner) using their best clinical judgment. Additionally, all COVID-19 deaths, including suspected or related, are required to be reported to OCME. On April 4, 2020, CT DPH and OCME released a joint memo to providers and facilities within Connecticut providing guidelines for certifying deaths due to COVID-19 that were consistent with the CDC’s guidelines and a reminder of the required reporting to OCME.25,26 As of July 1, 2021, OCME had reviewed every case reported and performed additional investigation on about one-third of reported deaths to better ascertain if COVID-19 did or did not cause or contribute to the death. Some of these investigations resulted in the OCME performing postmortem swabs for PCR testing on individuals whose deaths were suspected to be due to COVID-19, but antemortem diagnosis was unable to be made.31 The OCME issued or re-issued about 10% of COVID-19 death certificates and, when appropriate, removed COVID-19 from the death certificate. For standardization and tabulation of mortality statistics, written cause of death statements made by the certifiers on death certificates are sent to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the CDC which assigns cause of death codes according to the International Causes of Disease 10th Revision (ICD-10) classification system.25,26 COVID-19 deaths in this report are defined as those for which the death certificate has an ICD-10 code of U07.1 as either a primary (underlying) or a contributing cause of death. More information on COVID-19 mortality can be found at the following link: https://portal.ct.gov/DPH/Health-Information-Systems--Reporting/Mortality/Mortality-Statistics

Note the counts in this dataset may vary from the death counts in the other COVID-19-related datasets published on data.ct.gov, where deaths are counted on the date reported rather than the date of death

Please cite the following paper when using this dataset:

N. Thakur, “Five Years of COVID-19 Discourse on Instagram: A Labeled Instagram Dataset of Over Half a Million Posts for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis”, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (MLNLP 2024), Chengdu, China, October 18-20, 2024 (Paper accepted for publication, Preprint available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03293)

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 served as a catalyst for content creation and dissemination on social media platforms, as such platforms serve as virtual communities where people can connect and communicate with one another seamlessly. While there have been several works related to the mining and analysis of COVID-19-related posts on social media platforms such as Twitter (or X), YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, there is still limited research that focuses on the public discourse on Instagram in this context. Furthermore, the prior works in this field have only focused on the development and analysis of datasets of Instagram posts published during the first few months of the outbreak. The work presented in this paper aims to address this research gap and presents a novel multilingual dataset of 500,153 Instagram posts about COVID-19 published between January 2020 and September 2024. This dataset contains Instagram posts in 161 different languages. After the development of this dataset, multilingual sentiment analysis was performed using VADER and twitter-xlm-roberta-base-sentiment. This process involved classifying each post as positive, negative, or neutral. The results of sentiment analysis are presented as a separate attribute in this dataset.

For each of these posts, the Post ID, Post Description, Date of publication, language code, full version of the language, and sentiment label are presented as separate attributes in the dataset.

The Instagram posts in this dataset are present in 161 different languages out of which the top 10 languages in terms of frequency are English (343041 posts), Spanish (30220 posts), Hindi (15832 posts), Portuguese (15779 posts), Indonesian (11491 posts), Tamil (9592 posts), Arabic (9416 posts), German (7822 posts), Italian (5162 posts), Turkish (4632 posts)

There are 535,021 distinct hashtags in this dataset with the top 10 hashtags in terms of frequency being #covid19 (169865 posts), #covid (132485 posts), #coronavirus (117518 posts), #covid_19 (104069 posts), #covidtesting (95095 posts), #coronavirusupdates (75439 posts), #corona (39416 posts), #healthcare (38975 posts), #staysafe (36740 posts), #coronavirusoutbreak (34567 posts)

The following is a description of the attributes present in this dataset

• Post ID: Unique ID of each Instagram post
• Post Description: Complete description of each post in the language in which it was originally published
• Date: Date of publication in MM/DD/YYYY format
• Language code: Language code (for example: “en”) that represents the language of the post as detected using the Google Translate API
• Full Language: Full form of the language (for example: “English”) that represents the language of the post as detected using the Google Translate API
• Sentiment: Results of sentiment analysis (using the preprocessed version of each post) where each post was classified as positive, negative, or neutral

Open Research Questions

This dataset is expected to be helpful for the investigation of the following research questions and even beyond:

1. How does sentiment toward COVID-19 vary across different languages?
2. How has public sentiment toward COVID-19 evolved from 2020 to the present?
3. How do cultural differences affect social media discourse about COVID-19 across various languages?
4. How has COVID-19 impacted mental health, as reflected in social media posts across different languages?
5. How effective were public health campaigns in shifting public sentiment in different languages?
6. What patterns of vaccine hesitancy or support are present in different languages?
7. How did geopolitical events influence public sentiment about COVID-19 in multilingual social media discourse?
8. What role does social media discourse play in shaping public behavior toward COVID-19 in different linguistic communities?
9. How does the sentiment of minority or underrepresented languages compare to that of major world languages regarding COVID-19?
10. What insights can be gained by comparing the sentiment of COVID-19 posts in widely spoken languages (e.g., English, Spanish) to those in less common languages?

All the Instagram posts that were collected during this data mining process to develop this dataset were publicly available on Instagram and did not require a user to log in to Instagram to view the same (at the time of writing this paper).