Dental Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic: an Arabic Tweets Analysis (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Twitter is a powerful platform which could be used to improvise the demand and supply of dental services during a pandemic. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to examine the nature and dissemination of COVID-19 information related to dentistry on Twitter platform Arabic database. METHODS One hundred and fifty independent searches with a combination of keywords for both COVID-19 and dentistry from a preselected Arabic keyword were carried out for the period from the 2nd of March to the 6th of July 2020. Tweets were filtered to remove duplicate and unrelated tweets. The suitable tweets were 1,150. After calibration, two examiners coded the tweets following two main themes: COVID-19 and oral health-related information. Tweets were then compared with COVID-19 daily events in the Arab counties as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO). Descriptive analysis was performed to present the overview of the findings using Microsoft Excel. RESULTS There was no obvious association between time distribution of the tweets to the distribution of new COVID-19 cases and deaths during the period from March 2, 2020 to July 6, 2020. The most retweeted information was the help with urgent consultation or emergency dental treatment during COVID-19 tweeted by a dentist. There were 673 retweets and 1116 likes of this tweet. The most common tweets related to oral health was needs of dental treatment (n=462, 39.5%) of which, toothaches or wisdom tooth problems constituted 48% of the related tweets. CONCLUSIONS Twitter is a platform reflecting the public interest and concerns, based on the finding tweets tend to increase with major events and news and thus help navigate the proper action needed to address public concern.