A study of 40 hours of UK based tweeting on COVID-19.

Full data available here, focusing on period midnight on 20 March to 16:41 on 21 March, using methods described here.

The tweets included here used any of the following terms

- #coronavirus #coronacrisis #coronavirusupdate #coronavirusuk #covid2019 #coronaviruspandemic #COVIDー19 #Covid_19 #COVID-19 OR #COVID19

- AND #COVID19UK (without including this UK specific term the number of tweets would have been overwhelming - each extract can only include 18,000 tweets and or retweets).

Remember that Twitter searches are not "fuzzy" - so searching for #COVIDー19 for example will not identify tweets using #Covid_19 #COVID-19 or #COVID19 instead. Based on this very quick look, #COVID19 is the most frequently used hashtag at present (all the tweets included #COVID19UK because of the nature of the search).

Top 20 tweeters, top 100 tweets and 10 top hashtags are listed below (by decreasing order of number of retweets). Note that inclusion on this list does not indicate support for views expressed.

The total numbers included in this analysis are as follow:

Tweets 5,803
Retweets 15,570
Tweeters 4,070

Main lesson here: Search broadly for COVID-19 based tweets, adding in country specific terms if you're wanting to make this more manageable.

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