How the world's collective attention is being paid to a pandemic: COVID-19 related n-gram time series for 24 languages on Twitter

Understand

In confronting the global spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic we must have coordinated medical, operational, and political responses.

• In all efforts, data is crucial.
• Fundamentally, and in the possible absence of a vaccine for 12 to 18 months, we need universal, well-documented testing for both the presence of the disease as well as confirmed recovery through serological tests for antibodies, and we need to track major socioeconomic indices.
• But we also need auxiliary data of all kinds, including data related to how populations are talking about the unfolding pandemic through news and stories.