Análise de Sentimos de Tweets Relacionados ao Uso de Máscara Durante a Pandemia da Covid-19 no Brasil

Abstract

The world has recently gone through a global crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic began in a Chinese city called Wuhan in mid-December 2019 and spread across the world, infecting more than 596 million people and causing about 6.68 million fatalities. As the COVID-19 virus has much of its proliferation and contagion through the airways, experts and scholars in the health area recommended that the entire population wear masks in an attempt to stop the number of cases by creating a physical barrier to try to contain the respiratory droplets that serve as a means of spreading the virus. The use of masks in Brazil was adopted at the beginning of April of the year 2020, but its mandatory only started around the end of May of the same year. However, the misinformation about the use of the face mask generated great controversy, doubts and discomfort among the Brazilian population. This work aims to analyze the feeling of the Brazilian population regarding the use of masks as PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) through posts (tweets) taken from Twitter. The results reveal that an average of 89.3% of the tweets related to face masks were neutral. Most of these neutral tweets show the Brazilian population’s discomfort in using masks, but at the same time accepting the need to use them in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19.