Twitter Conversations about the COVID-19 Omicron Variant: A Large Scale Dataset of more than 500,000 Tweets

Please cite the following paper when using this dataset:

N. Thakur and C.Y. Han, “An Exploratory Study of Tweets about the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant: Insights from Sentiment Analysis, Language Interpretation, Source Tracking, Type Classification, and Embedded URL Detection,” Journal of COVID, 2022, Volume 5, Issue 3, pp. 1026-1049

Abstract

This open-access dataset is one of the salient contributions of the above-mentioned paper. It presents a total of 522,886 Tweet IDs of the same number of Tweets about the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant posted on Twitter since the first detected case of this variant on November 24, 2021. The dataset is compliant with the privacy policy, developer agreement, and guidelines for content redistribution of Twitter, as well as with the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles for scientific data management.

Data Description

The Tweet IDs are presented in 7 different .txt files based on the timelines of the associated tweets. The data collection followed a keyword-based approach and tweets comprising the "omicron" keyword were filtered, collected, and added to this dataset. The following is the description of these dataset files.

Filename: TweetIDs_November.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 16471, Date Range of the Tweet IDs: November 24, 2021 to November 30, 2021)

Filename: TweetIDs_December.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 99288, Date Range of the Tweet IDs: December 1, 2021 to December 31, 2021)

Filename: TweetIDs_January.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 92860, Date Range of the Tweet IDs: January 1, 2022 to January 31, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_February.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 89080, Date Range of the Tweet IDs: February 1, 2022 to February 28, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_March.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 97844, Date Range of the Tweet IDs: March 1, 2022 to March 31, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_April.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 91587, Date Range of the Tweet IDs: April 1, 2022 to April 20, 2022)

Filename: TweetIDs_May.txt (No. of Tweet IDs: 35756, Date Range of the Tweet IDs: May 1, 2022 to May 12, 2022)

In the above table, the last date for May is May 12 as it was the most recent date at the time of data collection and dataset upload. The dataset would be updated soon to incorporate more recent tweets.

The dataset contains only Tweet IDs in compliance with the terms and conditions mentioned in the privacy policy, developer agreement, and guidelines for content redistribution of Twitter. The Tweet IDs need to be hydrated to be used. For hydrating this dataset the Hydrator application (link to download and a step-by-step tutorial on how to use Hydrator) may be used.