Exploring the Chinese Public's Perception of Omicron Variants on Social Media: LDA-Based Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 is still raging. Similar to other RNA viruses, SARS-COV-2 is constantly mutating, which leads to the production of many infectious and lethal strains. For instance, the omicron variant detected in November 2021 became the leading strain of infection in many countries around the world and sparked an intense public debate on social media. The aim of this study is to explore the Chinese public's perception of the omicron variants on social media. A total of 121,632 points of data relating to omicron on Sina Weibo from 0:00 27 November 2021 to 23:59:59 30 March 2022 (Beijing time) were collected and analyzed with LDA-based topic modeling and DLUT-Emotion ontology-based sentiment analysis. The results indicate that (1) the public discussion of omicron is based on five topics, including omicron's impact on the economy, the omicron infection situation in other countries/regions, the omicron infection situation in China, omicron and vaccines and pandemic prevention and control for omicron. (2) From the 3 sentiment orientations of 121,632 valid Weibo posts, 49,402 posts were judged as positive emotions, accounting for approximately 40.6%; 47,667 were negative emotions, accounting for nearly 39.2%; and 24,563 were neutral emotions, accounting for about 20.2%. (3) The result of the analysis of the temporal trend of the seven categories of emotion attribution showed that fear kept decreasing, whereas good kept increasing. This study provides more insights into public perceptions of and attitudes toward emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. The results of this study may provide further recommendations for the Chinese government, public health authorities, and the media to promote knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 variant pandemic-resistant messages.