Researchers at the University of Waterloo are using social media in an attempt to forecast when we may see future outbreaks of diseases like COVID-19 and measles.
Using simulations, researchers at the school developed a method that uses social media interactions to predict when an outbreak appears likely.
It considers how a series of small incidents, like people espousing anti-vaccine views, would grow to cause a larger, more important change, such as an outbreak of measles. “It’s looking for signals that indicate a bout of vaccine hesitancy or vaccine refusal might be coming, based on characteristics of how people interact on Twitter,” Waterloo professor Chris Bauch told Global News through email.