Perception of Older Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic
A data analysis project evaluating the public’s perceptions and associations between the elderly and Coronavirus.
Introduction and Overview
At the end of 2019, a new strain of coronavirus was identified in Wuhan, China. Before long, it rapidly spread across China and throughout the world, resulting in a global pandemic that was declared in March of 2020. As of April 2021, this virus has resulted in over 135 million cases and over 2.9 million deaths.
A common misconception throughout the pandemic has been that ‘Coronavirus only kills old people.’ The initial data from China suggested that COVID-19 was more fatal among people who had underlying health conditions and those who were over 65 years old. Therefore, the first wave of public health recommendations emphasized how social-distancing and mask-wearing were necessary to protect our immuno-compromised peers and the vulnerable older adults. And so despite the fact we are still battling this pandemic more than a year later and that we now have data suggesting younger people are hardly immune, we still engage in discourse that negatively fuels ageist sentiment towards COVID-19.
After the US death count had surpassed 200,000 back in September 2020, I was surprised by how little empathy I saw in the media. I thought that part of the reason could be that mostly people of color and older adults were dying. Research shows that people don’t value elderly lives as much as they do young people’s, and so these deaths among the elderly population don’t seem to affect us as much as they should unfortunately. Therefore, I wanted to analyze the public’s sentiments regarding the elderly and Coronavirus on popular platforms such as Reddit and Twitter.
In this data project, I plan on investigating the follow questions:
1. How the mental health needs of older age-groups shifted throughout the pandemic?
2. How has the frequency of joint Google searches with the words ‘elderly’ and ‘coronavirus’ shifted since the beginning of the pandemic?
3. What are the general public sentiments towards the eldery and Coronavirus on Reddit and Twitter?
Background Analysis
COVID-19 Deaths by Age Group
The following figures were derived from the CDC’s Provisional Death COVID-19 Death Counts as of 04/07/2021.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevented (CDC), those who are 65 and older account for 80% of coronavirus-related deaths. More specifically, people 85 and older have the highest risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.
Both of these graphs above show the disproportionate amount of deaths among elderly age groups, specifically 65 years and above. There are both physical and social reasons on why they tend to be more vulnerable to COVID-19. First off, older people are much more vulnerable to infectious diseases due to their weakened immune systems. They are much more likely to have a plethora of comorbidities that make it harder for the immune system to fight the Coronavirus infection. In addition, most older adults also have to deal with isolation or mobility challenges that make it difficult for them to get the supplies/food they need in difficult times like these.
Mental Health Needs by Age Group
The following figures were derived from the CDC’s Household Pulse Survey as of 04/07/2021. There was a break between Phase 3 and 4 of the survey between Dec 22 - Jan5, hence the break in the graph.
Isolation and mobility challenges not only make it difficult to obtain essentials but take a toll on mental health. Many seniors are trying to stay safe by reducing contact with others and social distancing, but now suffer an increased risk of social isolation and loneliness.
Mental health needs were defined as taking prescription medicine for mental health and/or receiving counseling or therapy in the past 4 weeks. In the graph above, we see that the mental health needs among the 60–69 years age group are consistently the highest from August 2020 to April 2021. Although there are a few ups and downs, the mental health needs of all three age groups overall increased throughout between August-December 2020. On the other hand, the mental health needs of the 60–69 years age group and the 70–79 years age group decreased starting in January 2021, while the mental health needs of the 80 years and above age group was on a steady decline before shooting back up around mid February 2021. An explanation for the increased needs during the fall of 2020 for all age groups could be due to panic regarding the rising case numbers across the United States. On the other hand, an explanation for the decreased needs starting in January 2021 for the younger age groups could due to vaccine rollout and older adults being more comfortable interacting with family/friends.
Trends Analysis of Google Searches (Coronavirus & elderly search)
Using Google’s Search API, I was able to use the gtrendsR package to perform and view Google Trends for queries that included both ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘elderly.’ I was able to look at queries from both the past 12 months and the past 3 months to see and analyze how the prevalence of both words in a search query has changed throughout the pandemic.
As mentioned in the introduction, initially there were alot of misconceptions about who the virus killed/severely infected. It’s interesting to look at the Google Search query data and see how the prevalence of both words ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘elderly’ in a query was much higher at the beginning of the pandemic versus the present. The decline in prevalence in the 12-month graph could be due to new information regarding how young people are hardly immune — they can serve as asymptomatic carriers or even die from the virus themselves. Looking at the 3-month graph, there was not a large change in query prevalence over time. Overall, it seems that most of the decrease in the prevalence of both words ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘elderly’ in the same query happened between April to July 2020.
Public Sentiment Analysis of Reddit (Coronavirus & elderly thread)
Reddit is one of the most widely used social media platforms and is a top internet discussion place for a range of topics. Using the RedditExtractoR package, I was able to scrape a total of 488 comments that contained both ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘elderly’ as keywords. I was interested to see how Reddit users viewed the elderly during a public health crisis such as COVID-19 where they face disproportionate rates of infection and death.
The first graph constructed based on the top 10 unique words found in the Reddit thread reveals the popular usage of neutral terms, with most of the words relating to mask-wearing and vaccines.
Sentiment analysis with the NRC lexicon led to a large number of negative emotional categories such as anger, disgust, and fear. Although the distribution between the negative and positive posts seems to be almost similar, there appears to be a larger amount of total scores in negative emotional categories. This reaffirms my hypothesis that we would be seeing a large concentration of ageist beliefs regarding the pandemic.
Similar to the NRC analysis, I also used the Bing lexicon to categorize words within the comments as either negative or positive. Most of the negative words appeared more frequently compared to the positive words, and a lot of the most frequently used negative words were much stronger and more provoking in language (i.e. stupid, hate, bad) compared to the positive words. The results from the Bing lexicon portrayed a similar overall negative sentiment towards the elderly and Coronavirus as the NRC lexicon used in the analysis prior.
Current Public Sentiment Analysis of Twitter (#Coronavirus & elderly search)
I was able to conduct a similar analysis regarding sentiment on Twitter using the TwitterR package. However, with this approach, I was only able to collect 118 tweets from the past 7 days (April 3–10th) due to restrictions in Twitter’s standard Developer API.
Similar to the Reddit top 10 words analysis, most of the words are neutral in tone and usually are used in the context of healthcare and vaccines.
NRC sentiment analysis on Tweets led to similar results in emotional distribution compared to the Reddit comments. As mentioned in the Reddit analysis, there seems to be a larger amount of scores in negative emotional categories. The one difference I noticed between the two platforms was that there is an increased score for sadness among Tweets, which suggests that Twitter users may sympathize more with the plight of the pandemic.
The Bing lexicon on Twitter led to more pandemic-specific words for both the most frequently used negative and positive words compared to Reddit. All of the negative words appeared more frequently compared to the positive words, however the top 10 negative words seem to show empathy. For example, words like trauma, inhumane, and isolation do not indicate a mocking tone and seem to employ more a sympathetic tone. Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether ageist beliefs and language are also prevalent on Twitter.
Conclusion and Future Steps
Overall, both Reddit comments and Twitter tweets seem to have a higher proportion of negative sentiment when using ‘Coronavirus and elderly’ as keywords. This reaffirms the hypothesis that there is still a good concentration of ageist beliefs regarding the pandemic. However, looking at the Google Search query data there seems to be a decrease in the prevalence of both words ‘Coronavirus’ and ‘elderly’ in the same query. This suggests that over time there has been a decrease in the public’s association between the Coronavirus and the elderly. However, it is important to note that an association between words does not necessarily have to be a negative association as we also see some positive associations (i.e. support, commitment) in the Twitter and Reddit analyses.
In conclusion, it is difficult to say for certain if ageist perceptions towards COVID-19 have increased or decreased since the start of the pandemic. But, as of April 2021 there still seems to be negative rhetoric regarding the elderly and coronavirus on social media platforms.
For future steps, I would like to also to analyze how sentiment on the different social media platforms differs in various countries and see if cultural differences play a role in how the elderly are viewed especially in light of the pandemic.
Data Used
- Twitter (search term: #Coronavirus & elderly)
- Reddit (search term: Coronavirus & elderly)
- Google (search term: Coronavirus & elderly)
- CDC Household Pulse Survey
- CDC Provisional Death COVID-19 Death Counts
About the Author
Tanvi Kongara is a sophomore at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Healthcare Management and Business Analytics. This data project was conducted for the course OIDD245: Analytics & The Digital Economy.
