Using Tweets to Assess Mental Well-being of EssentialWorkers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to large-scale lifestyle changes and increased social isolation and stress on a societal level. This has had a unique impact on US "essential workers" (EWs) - who continue working outside their homes to provide critical services, such as hospital and infrastructure employees. We examine the use of Twitter by EWs as a step toward understanding the pandemic's impact on their mental well-being, as compared to the population as a whole. We found that EWs authored a higher ratio of mental health related tweets during the pandemic than the average user, but authored fewer tweets with Covid related keywords than average users. Despite this, sentiment analysis showed that, on average, EWs' tweets yield a more positive sentiment score than average Twitter users, both before and during the pandemic. Based on these initial insights, we highlight our future aims to investigate individual differences in this impact to EWs.