The early weeks of the Italian Covid-19 outbreak: sentiment insights from a Twitter analysis

On the 11th of March 2020 the World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic. Since the first cases declared by China on 31st December 2019 the number of affected countries has steadily increased. A large number of countries have chosen social distancing and partial or whole lockdown measures. This resolution was influenced also by the Imperial College's report, predicting the effects of non-pharmaceutical intervention to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand. In its first stages the COVID-19 spread was entirely dependant on the number of contacts among people, hence on the capacity to interrupt human to human virus’ transmission through the social distancing. Thus it can be stated that people's behaviours and lifestyle influence both the spread and the severity of this type of infectious diseases (airborne, droplets etc…), especially when no strict countermeasures have been put in place by central governments.