Dataset for English Health-Related Advice Directed to the General Public on Twitter During the Early Spread of COVID-19 [Dataset]

Health-related advice directed to the public on twitterprovides insight into the use of social media duringa pandemic. This paper describes our data collection, sampling, and analysis of 44 million tweets in English in March 2020. We make reference to a parallel dataset and analysis of tweets in Arabic during thesame period. The contribution of this paper is a description of our dataset, our coding process to indicate tweets with health related advice, and our analysis and comparisons of the characteristics of the tweets with and without health-related advice. These contributions providethe basis for future research on semi-automated classifiers for health-related advice and efforts to reduce thespread of harmful health advice.